In the Moment
‘The photographic process is 90% hard work and 10% luck.’ Frank Stallings, High School Photography Teacher
Photography was my first love. There I was, about 12 or 13, leafing through my mother’s books on obscure black and white photography. The images were of landscapes, nudes, capsicum and various mundane scenes. Yet, in black and white they were beautiful, mysterious and life affirming. Having inexplicably lost all my friends at 13, like some girls do, I dove headfirst into photography. My mother used her frequent flyer miles to get me a subscription to W Magazine, where every month I’d trawl through the pages and tear out interesting spreads, which I’d then tack onto my bedroom wall. I studied the worked of fashion photographers like Inez and Vinoodh and Helmut Newton. When she got me a subscription to Entertainment Weekly, I went absolutely nuts. The portraits of movie stars taken by the likes of Mark Seliger and Herb Ritts blew my mind. These actors were supposed to be showing themselves as they were, yet they were still somehow acting in front of the camera (an early warning that actors must never be trusted). This profession of becoming someone else at the click of a mechanism was amazing to me. To transform and have a fleeting totemic glance be captured, made me believe in magic. Though, as much as Annie Leibovitz wanted me to believe in her fantasies, I was never enticed. After a while her spreads became monotonous and the subjects seemed to be keenly aware of who they were posing for, so never got fully into character. The epitome of funkiness were the Got Milk? ads, that I collected and tacked up religiously. Such simple, noble portraits, that with the addition of a foamy white mustache became something else entirely.
There is a moment, a decisive moment, when the shutter must be clicked to capture the perfect visual story. A story that will transcend time with its profound meaning. No, other photographer has been capable of this feat quite like Henri-Cartier Bresson, my favourite photographer since adolescence. His ability to capture people as they are, doing what they do, with grace, wit and precision is akin to a novelist writing a scene. The black and white scenarios of his images magically come to technicolour life when you spot the glint in a subjects eye, or the congruency between an object and it’s mise-en-scene. His images are of life in it’s many shades of tragedy, hope, sadness and glee. I do not understand it, I’ve never been able to replicate it, but as a lover of film composition, Bresson’s moments caught in light and time, are nothing more than the rolling scenes of a film. Moments, in days of our lives as meandering beings.
When we look back at our lives, at events that came to mark us, there is a decisive moment we recall. That split second when we could have gone left instead of right, said yes instead of no, and changed the course of our existence. In looking back, I do not regret. I think: I saw, I lived and I believed. Charles de Gaulle once said to Bresson: ‘you have seen because you have believed,’ a statement I could not agree with more. Above my bed I have two framed images taken by Magnum photographers. On the right is Portofino, Italy, 1936 by Herbert List, an image of a Dalmatian looking up, as he sits next to his owner whose feet and legs are visible. On the left is an image of a spiral staircase, at the base of which a cyclist goes spinning by; Hyères, France, 1932 by Henri-Cartier Bresson. Besides honouring my great loves—photography, Mookie and cycling—these images are there to remind me of the spontaneity of life. How wonderful things happen when we least expect them. That to be alive, is to live in the moment.
