[Leica] Pilgrimage

[Alastair Firkin <firkin@netconnect.com.au>]

Pilgrimage: a pilgrim's journey, mortal life viewed as a journey. For 
a rangefinder lugger, this may take many forms, but last weekend I 
took one of them. Last Friday, after work (heat is work and work's a 
curse so all the heat in the universe has gotta "cool-down") Helen 
and I drove the 800 kms (500 miles) north to Canberra. The journey 
was not without its "trials". The rain, the poor visibility, and then 
nearing our destination the terrible barrier of two semi-trailers 
wedged across the freeway as it cut through a rocky outcrop. We 
backtracked and by-passed - to be a pilgrim.

Next morning, after feeding and walking the dogs, we parked outside 
the old Parliament house, climbed the stairs and entered the portrait 
gallery, where Tete a Tete is now showing. 120 photo portraits  by 
the Leica wielding Henri Cartier Bresson, originally put together in 
the late 1990's for the National portrait gallery in London. The 
images ranged from a beggar on the streets of Warsaw in 1931 to the 
"commissioned" work of the artist Freud in London 1997. It includes 
works of photojournalism, capturing the images of unknowns, and works 
of "access" with images of famous people, mostly artists nearing the 
end of their lives. There are few images of youth. The collection was 
stimulating inspiring and provocative. How could you include a 
blurred flat plain image of the face of Picasso in a collection of 
inspiring decisive moments? How can you call the image of poverty 
portraited by a starving child a "portrait" of a person? How can 
images from 1940 sit beside an image taken in 1990 and look as fresh? 
The answers are in the technique HCB uses to capture life on film. No 
staging, we see the individuals often in quite unflattering poses, 
given a very ordinary look, captured as simple humans in the course 
of their lives, without props or facades. The images are not always 
technically perfect-- I was pleased to see he also misloads screw 
mount leicas, and holds his focus closer than the subject, giving a 
blur to the face, but holding it sharper than the background, letting 
"bokeh" bring the subject into focus (a neat trick). The power of 
black and white to "cross" the decades lent a continuity to the 
exhibition which was reinforced by the continuity of technique. HCB 
seems to have hit on a formula and stuck with it, thereby creating a 
body of work with a definite linking thread.

Finally it kept asking the question -- what is a portrait? After we 
had wandered around the rest of Australia's only portrait gallery, 
the exhibition's radical nature certainly became more obvious. So 
many "sittings", poses, props, makeovers, gimmicks and glitz. So much 
of how we would like to see ourselves, rather than the way the pillow 
sees us. But in my mind the final question was why so little youth. 
Was HCB  sent out by Magnum to capture on celluloid the dials of 
famous people before they shuffled off this mortal coil and made 
their own pilgrimage, or is the artist aware that a portrait is the 
image of the person, and a person is unfinished as a youth. Old man's 
club or lively insight -- I would like to the think the latter.

Cheers from one weary pilgrim ;-)
- -- 
Alastair Firkin

http://www.afirkin.com