Re: [Leica] Keepers [was: David Bailey...]

[Guy Bennett <gbennett@lainet.com>]

Sorry for the pick apart response, but here goes...

>Well the last time I looked HCB was French. The French title of the book in
>question, Images a la Sauvette, is much harder to translate than you would
>think. Rather than 'the decisive moment' it translates to something like
>'images on the fly' or 'fleeting moments' or, how I personally would
>translate it, 'very quick on the eye'.


Here's what the Petit Robert has to say about "à la sauvette":

"à courir l'un après l'autre" ["to run after one another"] de "se sauver"
["to run away"]:

à la hâte ["hurriedly"], avec une précipitation suspecte ["with a
suspicious haste"]


>The point is that 'the decisive moment' is more of a snappy photo-editor's
>title and points towards the photojournalistic technique of capturing the
>height of the action -- the moment when Jack shot Lee Harvey or the ball was
>poised over the hoop.


I don't have the original 1952 edition of "Images à la sauvette," just
reprints of bits and pieces of it in both French and American collections
of his writing on photography. If I understand correctly "L'Instant
décisif" ["The Decisive Moment"] is the title of one section/chapter/essay
from the book, but that title was used as the title of the English
translation of "Images à la sauvette" when it was published by Simon and
Schuster in 1952. You can find the text in question in "L'Imaginare d'après
nature" (try translating that one), a collection of HCB's writings on
photography published by Fata Morgana in 1996. The English version of
*that* book is called (notice the escalation): "The Mind's Eye: Writings on
Photography and Photographers." It is available from Aperture.


>There is a lot more to HCB's particular technique than this. His schtick has
>been endlessly deconstructed on the streetphoto list as you can imagine but
>what emerges as a kind of consensus is that he is very formally preoccupied,
>in the sense of an overwhelming awareness of the graphic content of an
>image. So many classic HCB shots are about the kind of graphic balance that
>a kandinsky or a paul klee painting achieves, perhaps not surprising as they
>are his near contemporaries and he is a painter.


This is how he has always struck me. His reportage subject matter seems
secondary to the formal exploration of photographic space. Unlike other PJs
(Capa, for example), he can make major photographic statements without
there necessarily being a newsworthy event taking place in front of him,
because he is not really a PJ, but an artist, as your analogies with
kandinsky and klee suggest (and why not throw in Mondrian?).


>The interesting thing about looking at his pictures this way is that it then
>becomes possible that the universe contains an infinity of such moments, and
>that photographers are a kind of butterfly collector, swinging their
>leica-manufactured nets around in the hopes of snagging new species and
>pinning them to the negative. Hopefully without destroying the life in them.
>John Brownlow


Exactly as put by the Cardinal de Retz, who wrote: "Il n'ya rien en ce
monde qui n'ait un moment décisif" ["Everything in this world has a
decisive moment"], a phrase that HCB uses as the epigraph for "L'Instant
décisif."

Guy
- --
To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html