While watching Henri Cartier Bresson’s The Decisive Moment, I took notes on what interested me in regards to authoring, publishing and distributing photos. What I found particularly intriguing were his approaches to authoring photos, his perspectives and musings on the act of taking a photo and the qualities of the world that make photography so appealing.
Notes:
- Photography as a mean of drawing
- Can’t correct it
- Life is fluid, once the moment is gone, it’s gone forever
- Not a reporter
- Visual pleasure
- Geometry
- Sensuous and intellectual pleasure
- Difference between good and mediocre picture is millimetres
- Facts are not interesting
- Portraits are difficult
- A question mark you put on someone
- Difference is the fact they agreed to be photographed
- Like an ‘animal in their habitat’
- Be like a cat, don’t disturb them
- Have to try put camera between skin of person and their shirt
- People act differently in front of the camera
- Like an animal on prey
- There are no new ideas in the world, only new arrangements
- The world is being created every minute and the world is falling to pieces every minute
- England like watching actors, cannot jump on stage and play with them
- Some places where the pulse beats more
- ‘In places where I am all the time, I know too much and not enough’
- Lucidity
- Camera as a weapon – a way of shouting the way you feel
- Camera can be a machine gun, can be a psychoanalytical couch, can be a warm kiss, can be a sketchbook,
- Photography is ‘yes, yes, yes’
- No maybes
- An affirmation