Wanderings

Next I went to an exhibit of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, who I have just learned all about through wikipedia, haha. Like Hofmann, he was also taken prisoner during World War 2, by the Germans, and spent 35 months in prisoner of war camps... he finally managed to escape and worked with the underground resistance in France. He also dug up his camera, which he had buried on farmland. News had reached the U.S. that he was dead, and so MoMA started preparing a posthumous restrospective of his work. Oops. Anyway, wikipedia also informs that Cartier-Bresson was the first photographer to photograph the post-war Soviet Union, and that's what the exhibit was focused upon. 

I would love, not surprisingly, to learn about and do more photography. Right now I just have an old cheap Canon camera that is slow and runs out of batteries every five minutes, and takes... adequate pictures. I guess it's good because I wouldn't want to have to worry about a really expensive camera getting lost or stolen right now. But I'm looking forward to someday having the knowledge and equipment to go through a true photography phase... wandering, pondering, zooming in. It kills me to see absolutely gorgeous ideas and compositions, only to have the batteries die or the camera capture something ten times less sharp, less vivid. I can see how one might develop a whole relationship with their camera, once they found the one that was right, one whose perception of the world they agreed with. 

This is one of Cartier-Bresson's quotes on the moment of photography: 

"There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative," he said. "Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever."