There were many games that
Cartier-Bresson played with
his photographs. The
anarchist in him liked to test
the limits of a photograph.
When he butts up against those
limitations he uses the 2D
effects of the picture plane to
his advantage. Lets look at how
and why he does this.
Outside of the Box
There are a handful of artistic terms which are terribly abused. Words like Creativity, Originality and Genius are applied with such reckless abondonment that a young photographer would have a tough time deciding, who is actually a good photographer and who is just a gimmick.
In order for anyone to think “outside the box” its important to understand what “box” is being discussed. When it comes to Cartier-Bresson’s Surrealist photography (a term he preferred over photo journalism) the “box” refers to the difficulty of depicting a 3D scene on a 2D surface. Remember a photograph is dead flat. Depth is an illusion that is either enhanced or diminshed based on the skill of the photographer.
As an example, any yo-yo can take a picture of the ocean towards the horizon. In fact there are millions of terrible sunset pictures taken every evening. Just because the photographer shoots a scene with great depth will not guarentee that it will read. In fact the further objects are from the photographer the HARDER it is to create the illusion of depth. That is why the Hubble Telescope looks like it is beaming back Abstract Expressionists paintings. Creating depth on a flat surface well, is a tough business.
There are an immediate set of challenges presented to the photographer because they observe a world with depth, but only produce flat images. Fortunately for Cartier-Bresson he had a formal education in classical drawing. (In case anyone is curious, you do not need to know how to paint to be a photographer, but if you learn how to draw it will prove fantastically useful) His most influential teacher Andrè Lhote taught Cartier-Bresson the tools that artists employed for centuries to combat the flatness of the picture plane. He was shown how to use grids, geometry, passage, simultaneos contrast, arial perpective, radiating lines and a host of other artistic conventions.
Rules, Laws, Conventions, & Tools
Many message boards, forums, and comment sections on blogs get hung up on the ideas about artistic rules. The novice, unable to thread a connection between good and bad artists, concludes there are no rules in art. This is not true. They exist, but not in a rigid sense. Here is an example:
The “rule or law” of simultaneous contrasts states that if you have a neutral ground (medium gray) and you lay a white mark down, it will read with a certain intensity of contrast. The gray appears dark next to the white and vice versa.
The second you add a black mark adjacent to the white mark, the white will appear brighter, the black will appear darker. Additionally the gray background will now appear darker on one side next to the white and lighter on the other side next to the dark. Can you see this?
Now just so everyone is clear, THIS is not MY rule. It was given to me by my art teacher as it was given to him by his teacher. We don’t own these rules, we are merely custodians of them for the next generation.
You can call it a rule, a law, a convention or a tool. The name hardly matters. The important thing is that you know what it is, how to use it, and where to find it when you are looking through the viewfinder. If these terms are confusing or new to you, my recommendation is that you take up study with someone who knows them and can explain how to use these tools.
Otherwise you end up with a tool box full of stuff with no user manual. I mean you can use a compass to skewer a shrimp, but wouldn’t it be better to use it to draw a circle? Further more, wouldn’t it be great if you could draw a circle, sphere, isometric ellipse and an arc? Can you see what I am getting at here? There are a number of tools that are potentially at our disposal, but we need to learn how to use them properly. Then we can bend, break and distort the rules to our hearts content. Lets have a look at where Cartier-Bresson played with the 2D element of a photograph.
Erase the Mistakes
Cartier-Bresson was famous for destroying the negatives he disliked. Before the start of World War II he cut up all his rejected negatives before he was put in a POW camp. Presumably, many of his early failures were on those contact sheets. In fact I am positve the contacts were filled with mistakes. Everyone’s early contacts are a mess.
In his early work, he learned how to create the illusion on the third dimension by employing a number of artistic conventions like properly overlapping forms. It was a tool he used over and over again to give us a huge sense of the world in a tiny 35mm negative.
But overtime, he wanted to experiment and see what would happen if he flattened the image out again. Picasso once said that “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” In his exaggerated quote here, Picasso is saying that convention is easier to master, because someone shows you how to do it. In this case Picasso’s father was an art teacher. He taught the young lad how to paint. As a result he was producing promising work as a twelve year old. But once you understand the conventions of artists, you will have a new problem on your hands. What can I do that is not just a repetition of their work? What happens if I selectively break some of the rules I was taught?
Breaking the Box
When Cartier-Bresson starts to produce images that are two dimensional, he discovers that when you square up to a scene by making all of the verticals plumb, something curious happens. The image becomes totally flat. There is no depth, no recession. The figures float in an abstraction of rectalinear shapes. The scenes read like dreams. The dream scape was a preoccupation of most of Surrealists, including Cartier-Bresson.
By removing the 3D effect of the box, he starts to unveil observations about how people interact with each other and architecture. If, however, he wanted this tactic to work, he needed to employ a number of addition techniques for the image to read.
- There needs to be a critically strong figure to ground relationship. Since the figures are often small they need to stand against highly contrasting grounds whether they are dark doorways or bright skies.
- We can not be allowed to see the side of the box, otherwise it ruins the illusion.
- All single point perspective lines need to be elliminated. The second that “depth” is reintroduced the picture will wander back to the realm of mediocraty (unless there is a lunatic raging to escape, see picture below).
When you grow up in a small town, everyone knows each other. I grew up in a town of ten thousand, every misstep I took was reported back to my parents. But in a big city, anonimity is the rule. No one knows who we are or what we do. Life in a city means that only a wall might divide the activites of perfect strangers. Unless we go around peeling off the faces of buildings, there is a challenge in how we depict the vignettes of city life.
Cartier-Bresson found this to be an engaging task, one which he would photograph in Europe, America and Asia. He locates scenes where we are shown a series of doorways, windows, or even full rooms. Inside the confines of a frame he waits for moments when a single figure is in view. The pictures show people connected by proximity, not by interaction. Each of the subjcts may be going about their own life, within arms reach of another person. And just like any technique, he starts off simply by focusing on one figure in a doorway like in Portugal and finally moving to his masterpiece with a staggering seven figures in France.
The Square versus the Cube
In Cartier-Bresson’s early experiments, he looks for scenes where a few isolated figures exist within a rectangle inside of his picture frame. The scenes in Japan, Italy, and France all show us the side view of a box with figures inside the frame. It freezes in eternity, moments of these people lives as if we were watching two television screens at once. What he sacrifices with depth, he makes up for with careful figure placement. The picture is successfully flattened. The space between the figures is compressed. From our point of view they exist in the same space, even if from their point of view they may be spread apart. Its fascinating, once we key into his game to understand how he manipulates space by positioning his camera in a specific location.
It sheds more light on to his “2mm quote.”
When Cartier-Bresson was in Japan, he photographed a Noh play from a curious angle. Once again we see him square up to the scene, which eliminates perspective all together. We are left with a view of the woods and a cut away view of a house. The contrast of the performance and the forest is played against the wood post that divides the scene vertically.
Now if you want to get into the commentary of the wood being a component of the forest, which has been manipulated by man and then the product is the play on the interior, that is all good. You CAN have that content based conversation. But its important to understand why that conversation is even possible. It is only because he employed his design technique successfully that the picture functions. The axiom of form following function could be restated that “if function is to exist, it needs proper form.”
Not every attempt was successful. And if you are like me, you might look at this picture and say “I have taken a picture like that and I don’t feel like Cartier-Bresson.” Well thats because if we take these ideas at their most basic form they are nothing special. We will just create a bunch of flat pictures, like this one above. It is flat, it does have good figure to ground relationship, though it is poorly lit, and suffers from camera shake. It is so stripped down that all we are left with is a floating head. It may be artistically correct, but its just boring. This can happen. Just because you use a $1000 chisel, it won’t guarantee that you will make a nice chair. Or in our case, just because you use a Leica won’t be insurance against bad pictures. We need to take the rules, laws or conventions and apply with layered complexity in active scenes.
The scene in Simiane la Rotonde is one of Cartier-Bresson’s finest photographs. It must have been a scene that he walked upon and knew “Oh dear God, do I have a picture here.” It is, for all intents and purposes dead flat. There is a slight amount of perspective on the left wall and in the ceiling, but they are so subduded in comparison to the figures. It hardly matters. What does matter is the brilliant layout and seperation of four groups of people in a space.
If we take an closer look at the placement of everyone we will start to see the mastery, and I do not use that term lightly here, in the photograph. Based on the lead up of all the articles you have read to date, lets see how this photograph falls into our criterion.
Figure to Ground Relationship: We have all dark figures on a light ground. It works.
- Aspective Views: We have clear views of every figure, including the dogs. There is only one figure on the far right that is a little clipped, but if you can get seven good views, TAKE IT.
- Gamut: There is a dominant vertical, horizontal and diagonal element in the composition all set within the frame of the 1.5 rectangle (no cropping because it would destroy the integrity of these relationships.)
- Subject Lighting: The main subjects in the foreground are properly lit. There are not other elements that competes with them. The other figures are essentially backlit and function more as sihloettes than round volumes. This is another layer of successful flatness.
Where is he breaking the rules:
- PICTURE EDGE. The front figures are almost “sitting” on the edge of the frame. This gives the illusion that they are spilling on to our laps. As a beginner, the whole goal of a photograph is to enhance the illusion of depth. Why? Because a novice will accidentally take flat photos all the time. The classical challenge is to create depth where there is only flatness. If you want a scene to read as a view through a window, normally the rule is to give some space at the bottom of the frame. But if you want them to sit on the edge of the negative, do like Cartier-Bresson above.
- BLOWN OUT. The over exposed background defies the horizon. The picture exists in no real space. We have no sense of what is beyond that ledge. We can guess that there is something in the distance, but as far as the photograph is concerned there is nothing but white space. It is “space-less.” This is one of the many cases where an HDR junkie would wreck a picture. If the background is blown out, sometimes its best to let it be. There is a time and a place for everything.
- DEAD FLAT. Lastly the picture is flatter than flat. The front figures are the only ones who read as volumes. The rear figures and the dogs are outlines. But Cartier-Bresson only needs them as supporting elements of rhythm in the piece. He does not need them all to read as volumes. The columns and the wall are also flatly lit and do not read as volumetric. If we judge this image on its 3D elements, its a failure. But when we understand that Cartier-Bresson MAKE 3D images if he wants to and is choosing to flatten this image, the picture reads differently. Here he plays the fresco painters game, by not violating the intergity of the flat piece of paper.
- RECESSION OF FIGURES. Our only real indication of space exists because the people in the background are smaller than the two boys in the foreground.
As we wind down the Surrealist Manifesto series, I hope you all have started to see that Cartier-Bresson is more than a hunter of the decisive moment. His work is, in my opinion, wildly underestimated, poorly taught, and trivialized. My goal in writing about these works is to open the artistic discussion to those who are interested. Art, when its good, possesses a depth that baffles the novice. The game is so deep that in one hundred lifetimes we could not repeat ourselves. My contention is that after a few short articles, you can see what I am taking about here. It does not require any amount of specialized intelligence. The ideas are democratic and accessible to anyone willing to invest the time. The equation with art is that the more you invest the more you will get out of the process. The well of knowledge is very deep. Don’t worry about drinking too much. That’s impossible.
I give all of you a tremendous amount of credit for pushing your own knowledge to new levels and expect that if you continue, the apparent limits of your lenses will evaporate. Photography and art have molded the course of my life and they can do the same for you. Its an open invitation to explore the ideas of design as you travel the world, exactly as Cartier-Bresson did for nearly 90 years. Along the way you will meet some extrordinary people and search for the ways to say thank to them all. The interaction between the world and your camera is a gift, one that is enhanced with understanding.