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“Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing a meditation”
–Henri-Cartier Bresson
I was fifteen, driving through the tranquil mountains in northern Wyoming, and for days scenting the sulfurous air and that exquisite, unearthly beauty of Yellowstone. Seeing the world in a vague yet zealous vision, I wondered.
“What to do to last this very journey, to seize the moment!?”
Our friend’s 35-millimeter did well in reprinting Yellowstone’s colors (I recall to this day going through his portfolio years later in central Arkansas). It did, however, a less satisfying job capturing the moment.
The smell of sulfur was lost in his photos.
So later I began my own journey. At first photography served a less important role to me, I used it as an omnipotent tool for capturing the reality–perhaps the same way as I saw literature.
Then, one day, talking to a friend, I said, “photography is the art of deceiving eyes.”
I wasn’t exactly wrong. I believed in the world with uncontested idealism and more naiveté than I do today. I yearned for a form of art that’s transcendental. Surrealism, l’avant-garde.
To Bresson, arguably the greatest photographer ever lived, the photos are “images à la sauvette”
–the decisive moment.
Doubtless, I’ve encountered such moment more than I could enumerate. I’ve felt that instant flash of inspiration. In my understanding the art of photography bears much resemblance as the art of confessing one’s love (neither of which I have learned well) –We’ve waited long and hard for that instant, which will be lost in the very next second, and what’s left will only be the shadows of our past and a mist of futures. The fortuitous does not wait.
It’s quite pathetic that I now resort on the digital maneuvers to create the ever more colorful shallowness. It seems that I have indulged myself in the chromatic kitsch for too long.
A photo, like a poem, should, in all its subtlety, convey a powerful message beyond its composition, not to say beyond its mere colors. Its power should transfix the context.
When we were first taught to use the language, we were asked to use it with conciseness and clarity, it wasn’t til much later we learned that the art of language more often than not lies within the ambiguity of our expressions.
The same holds for photography. I’ve spent the past 3 years learning to “master” the techniques of exposure, reading books on photographic aestheticism and compositions. Only recently have I realized, a photo can be blurred, overexposed, out of tone, and have no “proper” composition at all, yet can nonetheless be a masterpiece.
Humans, I believe, is the most worthy subject above all to photograph. The idea lies close to photojournalism, but with a completely different take. Earth would of course be a cleaner, perhaps even better place had humans not been created, but it would also have no meanings at all.
So the goal is, to take photos of people, especially those beloved ones, with a passion.
