A Lawrence University alumni, Dan Leers ('02) came back to Lawrence campus 8 years after his graduation to give a lecture. He talked about his experience of how he got from being an Art History major at Lawrence to curating in different museum and going to Columbia University, and finally got a job at the world-top class museum, MoMA. He then introduced us to the Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004)'s photography exhibition. As you can see from this MoMA's official website blog entry, At Home Everywhere: The Travels of Henri Cartier-Bresson, that Dan Leers himself wrote, Leers put a lot of effort and time in researching about Cartier-Bresson and his works of photogerapy so to gather information and place Cartier-Bresson's works in the chronological order.In the lecture (also mentioned in the blog), Leers listed some of the places and moments Cartier-Bresson captured---and he happened to be at the places where historically critical events occured; King George VI's coronation in England; Nehru announcement of Gandhi's assassination in India; Indonesia's independence from the Dutch, etc. Then he was in China, then Russia, then Japan, and the list goes on.
The video clip below shows a short excerpt of Cartier-Bresson's idea of photography. He talks about life, and how pictures are taken in the moment of life.
The intuition tells us to capture the moment through photography. What is captured in a photography cannot be erased the moment you capture it. If mistakes are made, you just have to take another one. This is the idea of photography way before the digital world. This clip reminded me of my photography class. Being too used to the digital world, I had hard time getting used to the idea of not being able to see the "moment" I just captured, and not being able to click the "erase" button when pictures came out badly. You just have to capture the right moment at the right time---and Henri Cartier-Bresson had done that so successfully.
Being a big traveller myself, I was truly fascinated by Leers lecture, and learning about this legendary photographer, Cartier-Bresson. As Leers said, Cartier-Bresson was never at "home. He was restlessly crossing borders and luckily being in the right places at the right time-capturing and document moments that will remain in history forever. This inspired me to urge to take more "good" photos whereever I go, not just photos of tourists' sites, but the photos that capture the "life" of the place.
I really enjoyed your juxtaposition of digital photography against film photography, and I empathized with not being able to see the picture right away! It would be interesting to know Cartier-Bresson's opinion of digital photography now and see if he thought that digital photography enabled or hindered capturing the decisive moment.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Aliana in the way that it would indeed be interesting to hear Cartier-Bresson's opinion of digital photography. I feel that in today's world, an image is being captured at any given place and at any given time. What comes to mind at the moment are the Google Earth satellite photos that have captured odd or incriminating things. This also rather delves into the observation portion of today's world, but I would love to see how or if Henri Cartier-Bresson might apply the technologies we now have.
ReplyDeleteAlso, here's some of those Google Earth images which might give you a laugh: http://izismile.com/2009/04/15/20_crimes_caught_on_google_street_view_46_pics.html
Keep in mind that HCB sent his exposed film to his agency for processing, printing and distribution. He didn't see his photographs until they appeared in a magazine weeks or months later! He had to know exactly what he was doing with his camera and approach!
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