same old instrument forever

Sam--I owe him a lot; he is one of those very rare people, along with Tériade, who some twenty-five years ago encouraged me to quit playing the same old instrument forever.

To those who were surprised that I abandoned photography, he'd say: "Let him draw if that's what he likes, and anyway, he never stopped taking photographs, only now it isn't with a camera but mentally."

Henri Cartier-Bresson speaking of his friend Sam Szafran, and his own decision to stop shooting and focus on his illustrations, in The Mind's Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers.

It's Henri's birthday, and I pulled the book off the shelf to exhort y'all to go out and shoot something. The book fell open to this page.

Which was not what I was expecting. But was certainly what I needed to hear.

situational context, part 1

Photo: Henri Cartier-Bresson

“When everything is blurred you cannot convey the motion of the bicyclist.”
“Why is the staircase so ‘soft’? Camera shake?”
“Gray, blurry, small, odd crop.”

Flickr comments/criticism (made in, I suspect, a DeleteMe thread -- one of the few places on Flickr where criticism is invited) on a Henri Cartier-Bresson photo that a Flickrite posted as one of their own. As cited in Flickr: Sepia No More in Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

The piece does a pretty good job of identifying the qualities that can catapult images into the upper regions of Flickr’s Explore -- serious saturation, aggressive postproduction processing, and images that read well as thumbnails -- and also bemoans Flickr's impact on popular photography.

stolen moments

stolen moments
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

If I'd know every plane that I might hope to hop out of LaGuardia was stacked one on top of another in the wake of severe electrical storms in Chicago, I probably would have taken more time this afternoon than the brief interlude I was able to steal (between a meeting that wrapped early and a cab that was destined to take me --jolting and revolting in one of those gotta accelerate full speed and then slam on my brakes even if I'm only inching forward a couple of feet rides) -- I probably would have lingered a little bit longer at the International Center for Photography.

Louise Brooks was there -- that's her up above in a shot swiped from the brochure for the "'New Woman' in Weimar Cinema" exhibit. Lovely stuff -- luminous, powerful, polyamorous -- but she was just the gravy.

I was there to see Henri Cartier-Bresson, in an exhibition of the "Scrapbook" photographs that he compiled for MoMA after he emerged from the grave -- literally -- escaping a German concentration camp after everyone thought he was dead.

And I was pleased and startled to see Martin Munkacsi, an Austrian photographer whose photography (one shot in particular -- that of three boys running into the sea) Bresson would later remark made him say "Damn!" and grab his camera and run into the street -- because he didn't know photography could look like that.

It was, to use Mr. Cartier-Bresson's phrase, a brief moment de graĉe -- a moment of extreme pleasure -- in a day that was otherwise nasty and brutish and, apparently, interminable.


Update from the desk -- another storm just hit Chicago. I may be here all night.