Inessential Stuff

Whenever someone asks me who my favorite photographer is, the answer is easy:  Henri Cartier-Bresson, followed by Henri Cartier-Bresson, and then Henri Cartier-Bresson. August is a good time to celebrate his life, for he was born on August 22, 1908, and died five years ago, on August 3, 2004.

With a small Leica 35 mm film camera, Cartier-Bresson forever changed photography. He was the great master of “street photography”, capturing people unaware, documenting their movements, activities, and emotions.  But he was no simple snap-shooter.  Himself a painter, he brought the eye of an artist to his work.  In fact, it is that combination—capturing the spontaneous moments around him with a keen eye for composition—that made him so great.

Henri Cartier-Bresson wrote about his photographic philosophy in a book (with a cover drawn by Henri Matisse) that is called, in its English translation, The Decisive Moment.  For Cartier-Bresson, the decisive moment is “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression.”

Elaborating further, he said, “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.”

Even when taking a portrait, Cartier-Bresson aimed for something natural and spontaneous, that somehow captured something essential about the person’s personality or character.  His portrait of Alberto Giacometti is illustrative of his ability to create a natural portrait of someone in one’s own environment.

For his talent for capturing such decisive moments, Henri Cartier-Bresson has been called the father of photojournalism, and his philosophy has had a big impact on me as a photographer.  I had no interest in wedding photography until I saw that it was possible to bring some of Cartier-Bresson’s philosophy into traditional wedding images. That is, to shoot a wedding as a photojournalist. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s inspiration to me, and impact upon me, can be detected, by those who are especially observant, in the name of my company itself.

A gorgeous collection of his work can be found in Henri Cartier-Bresson:  Photographer, and you can learn more about his life and philosophy here.  So, 101 years and 2 days after his birth, everyone raise a cup for Henri Cartier-Bresson.

I have driven past Ritzville, Washington too many times to count.  It sits 60 miles west of Spokane, just far enough off Interstate 90 to be easily ignored, either as I head on toward Seattle or as I turn off onto US Route 395 toward the Tri-Cities.  I have, on several occasions, gotten off the eastern exit of Ritzville (it is a two exit town), sometimes as a place to launch off onto back roads, and once to stop at a highway mini-mart.  But I had never been past that mini-mart, down the road, into Ritzville itself.

It was never ritzy—it derives its name from its founder, Philip Ritz, not from monuments of glamour and glitter.  Even so, I had heard it was a fine little town, with a picturesque, though deteriorating, downtown. So one evening this week, I drove off the first eastern Ritzville exit, and continued down the road past the mini-mart, to see what I had been passing by all these years.