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There's something less to the
practice of casual photography than meets the eye. The entire automatic
process of identifying, isolating and capturing images ultimately diminishes
the larger reality out there by putting too fine a focus on the choices of
memory, at the cost of a much bigger picture. As a result the bigger picture
is often unappreciated, ignored or lost and, instead, a moment snapped up
informally and out of context gains significance. And that too only for a
short while. Because as the years pass the perceived worth of the
overwhelming majority of these little halted bits of time on static pieces
of paper or pixels fade till they are forgotten.
(I'm reminded of a short poem by Tennyson: Flower
in the crannied wall,/ I pluck you out of the crannies,/ I hold you here,
root and all, in my hand,/ Little flower -- but if I could understand/ What
you are, root and all, and all in all,/ I should know what God and man is.
Here, the pre-photograph is the crannied wall and the "all in all" around
the flower, and the photograph is the plucked flower. Perhaps if Tennyson
didn't uproot it out of its context he might have stood a better chance of
understanding its nature and knowing what God and man is. What do you do
with dry petals mounted in an album?)
So anyway, at the same time the popularity of
photography has never been higher. There are cameras in everybody's
possession now --- even if they're only looking into their computer's webcam
or holding a mobile phone. Yes, but there's a reason for this popularity:
unlike painting or sculpture, photography is just getting simpler, cheaper
and easier to redistribute all the time. Time was when people had to make
their own film and then develop it themselves. Later they bought film and
sent it for processing. Still later came instant Polaroids. Today in the
single second it takes for an image to emerge on screen one doesn't even
have to focus. It's great progress but the effort's gone.
And so has the effort to look beyond the pre-
photographic image and all its dynamic fundamental connections. Henri
Cartier - Bresson, one of the greatest photographers of all time, also had
the unique ability to capture the fleeting instant. He called this the
"decisive moment". But in that moment he managed to reveal the subject's
significance in form, content and expression and relate the rest of the
world around it to it. |
