The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers
Sunday, May 3rd, 2009
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson isn’t known for his writing, but there are some gems in this small collection. To me the most interesting was the reprinted introduction to his book “The Decisive Moment”. The phrase is such a cliche that to read it in it’s original form is somewhat surprising. For the “moment” Cartier-Bresson defines so elegantly is not – only or necessarily – the peak of the action, but the moment at which the photograph’s formal composition is perfect and complete. Cartier-Bresson is not merely speaking of the hunt for the defining journalistic instant, but of the hunt for what he calls geometry.
The book also contains some interesting comments about portraiture and about color. Cartier-Bresson’s objection to color photography was not that it was intrinsically inferior to black-and-white, but that what we now call “analog” photographic processes didn’t give him control over color.
