One idea alone is enough to fill an existence

 

I picked up this book because it looked impressive and was on sale at BookXcess. I'd never heard of Cartier-Bresson but then, his name sounded enchanting and I liked the cover. I've bought books for far less.

It ended up being part biography, part meditation on the life of a photographer who always happened to be in the right place at the right time because he seemed to live his life in this eternal state of preparedness, always on the lookout for surprises, never expecting them; someone with an appointment with chance that could not be fixed in advance.

The real surprise was to learn his guiding text: Zen in the Art of Archery by German philosophy professor, Eugen Herrigel.

Breaking it down for you, the author Pierre Assouline says it is about forgetting yourself, abstracting yourself, with nothing to prove: only when it is no longer a pastime but a means of life and death does archery become an artless art, and then the archer, in conflict with himself, is both Master and non-Master, since he is mentally capable of hitting his target without bow and arrow.

The book is as much about Cartier-Bresson's philosophy of life as it is about the events in his life. Did you know his first wife was Javanese? He was a man who loved women - but you don't really get details about this - it is not sordid. And the reason for the divorce is only hinted at (she was too bossy for his taste). His second wife, much later, was a photographer, like him, European, like him - and it was a happy marriage.

Also interesting that he went to see a tarot card reader, the mother of a friend, who foretold all the major events in his life. His marriage to someone from the East. His second marriage. His death. (Also other stuff but I can't remember now).

The thing is, Cartier-Bresson wanted to be an artist and was a surrealist in the early years. He went from that to photography but since he came from an art background, each picture was composed artistically, with a sense of geometry.

He met nearly all the greats of his day from Sartre to Picasso to Gandhi and many more, took photos of most of them:

Portraits were his main focus, and in this field he gained a reputation for being lucky - erroneous because luck could not explain the sheer number of coincidences. It would be less romantic but more pragmatic to fix on the notion of availability, because when eyes and ears are constantly on the alert and the Leica is constantly in the hand, you are bound to intersect with lives at the moment of destiny. 

(For instance, he was one of the last people to see Gandhi alive and thus, has the last photograph of him, achieving international recognition for his coverage of Gandhi's funeral in 1948 and the last stage of the Chinese civil war in 1949). 

When the world-renowned Indian movie director Satyajit Ray saw Cartier-Bresson's images of India in its hour of grief, he was struck by how the photographer had avoided all sensationalism, story-telling and politics to focus on what others might have judged insignificant - ordinary people whose disorientation we can all understand.

You simply have to have the instinct for the time, the patience to wait without expectation, and the awareness to seize the decisive moment. Cartier-Bresson had all those qualities in abundance.

And Cartier-Bresson only felt that a portrait was successful when he captured not an expression or a pose, but an inner silence - something like the gap between the instant and eternity.

For instance, walking along the avenue du Maine, he happened to look through the window of an otherwise empty restaurant, and caught sight of an old man lost in thought, wrapped in his coat, with bowler hat and umbrella, sitting on his chair as if all alone in the world, gazing blankly at nothing in particular.

He captured the shot.

He hated colour photographs because they became dated quickly while the black and white remained timeless, he hated flash photography because he found it rude (a lack of good manners and pretentious to boot), he hated technology (the more the cameras, the fewer the photographers) and luckily he died before the age of social media. I wonder what he would have thought of Facebook or Instagram with numerous reproductions of food and selfies and wefies. It beggars description.

He was one of the co-founders of Magnum, the famous photography cooperative that was owned by the photographers themselves. Ever since reading about his famous book, The Decisive Moment, I've wanted my own copy. It is available in Kinokuniya, but I took a look at how much it would cost and thought, hmmm....maybe not yet.

The thing about this book is that although it was about a photographer, I got lost in the sheer poetry of it. Maybe that's what happens when the writer is French and a lover of the arts and highly evocative. It hinted at another way of life, where the focus is neither on money nor fame but on being true to yourself and removing all dross from your spirit until who you really are shines through.

And I leave you with these words, which are especially startling for someone as scattered as me, watching five Korean shows at the same time and leaving about 6 different books around the house in various states of being read:

What was special about him was a surprising wisdom in so wild a man, for he already knew something that many others take years to discover: that one must have an idea and pursue it to the end. One idea alone is enough to fill an existence.