On Photography, with Platon Rivellis, 1995, part 3, Cities
A painter, when creating a painting, has to fill a blank canvas, adding elements to create a world. These elements -colors, shapes, imaginations- are his own, leading to the birth of a new work.
In contrast, a photographer creates his new work from pieces of the world he sees before him. Ultimately, he chooses and chooses by excluding. He leaves things out. The rectangle or square frame imposed upon him defines his world.
Therefore, what he discards, what he does not want to include in the frame, defines his photograph.
Andre Kertesz was born in Hungary but spent many years in Paris and New York, where he died at an advanced age. For Kertesz, the cities he photographed are sources of surprise and joy. The unexpected ambushes him at every street corner. He creates images where the apparent geometric composition is instinctively or meticulously hidden beneath tender humor. Kertesz is simple and discreet.
He does not photograph ostentatious subjects in an ostentatious way; he prefers low tones that conceal layers of enjoyment for the viewer to discover over time.
Like Mozart, he allows a first approach through the simplicity of melody, ensuring a new, unforced contact that reveals the richness and subtlety of a composition that abhors the obvious.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer whose fame transcends photography enthusiasts, is, in contrast to Kertesz, enigmatic and inaccessible. He resembles Johann Sebastian Bach's fugues—pure and absolute music before us, to be enjoyed only if we make the effort to approach it.
No foreground melody comes to our aid. Cartier-Bresson's photographs depict city scenes where the focus is neither the people nor the life, but the order and harmony he discovers or imposes. These are incomprehensible forms he delights in finding before him or pretends to discover, while, ultimately, he himself creates them. Cartier-Bresson's world consists of suspended moments of absolute balance.
The photographer does not photograph the city's sounds but listens to them.
He uses them. They, too, are a tool in the falsification he will impose on this landscape.
When he plays between a village and a city, between shadows and light, when he makes it night or day.
Ultimately, he will be the organizer of a grand lie, and this lie will provide his own image of his city. And when he photographs another city on another day, all these together will depict the city of his fairy tale.
Practically, how can he do this?
He has technical tools at his disposal.
He has the lens that will choose what to exclude from the frame. He has the light that will choose whether it will be day or night, and he has the four sides that will imply the continuation of the city.
His city will be his absolute frame, but also everything else the viewer imagines outside it.
The American, though of Swiss origin, Robert Frank, the beatnik photographer of the 1950s, roamed America, his second homeland, for two years, discovering for the first time the world he would inhabit.
With a nervous style, using highly sensitive film, he moves through dark spaces and observes the position of people in the city without sentimentality.
Whether alone or in groups, they are enclosed in his gaze. The film grains and the gray tones underline the melancholy of the spaces.
The only light is the photograph itself, betraying the creator's intelligence, who knows how to turn a jukebox, a bus, a solitary passenger, or a street corner into moments of creative tension that transcend the event. Frank's America is a series of magnified details and moments through a gaze full of curiosity.
A photographer must master the necessary technique to serve the type of photography he practices.
He must master it first to solve the problems of this type and second (and most importantly) to make the technique disappear. If the technique is visibly present in his work, the content of the work is diminished.
Closely tied to technique is technology. And there, the problem is much greater in our time. All photographers love technology since it essentially starts as a game—the camera. But the problem is they use technology they do not need, simply because someone else invented it.
They must have the courage to strip down their technological means and use precisely only what serves their work.
At the same time, New Yorker Garry Winogrand began his terrifying collection of moments of madness, walking the streets of cities for years. Devouring kilometers of film, he lay in wait for the unusual and unexpected.
Almost, one might say, provoking it.
His humorous, perhaps ironic, gaze did not exceed the limits of the viewer.
He never advanced to commentary or condemnation. He simply observed that we live in a world where the unexpected and surreal are so close to us that we ignore or do not see them.
He believed that the world is a theater, and he is the unique spectator capturing or generating its peculiar moments. His photographic form followed the same logic. Crooked frames and seemingly random complex shots, yet for any experienced eye, incredibly tight and complete.
The great French photographer Eugene Atget entered photography late in life, like Cameron.
However, this did not prevent him from building a body of work until his death in 1922, justly considered the prologue to the great chain of pure photography, which found worthy representatives in America in the persons of Evans, Frank, and Winogrand.
With a large and cumbersome wooden camera, Atget walked the streets of early 20th-century Paris, methodically recording everything. Street corners, house facades, doors, and building details, street vendors.
In most of his photographs (was it instinct or simple wisdom?), Atget managed to transcend his subject, turning the snapshot or detail into a marvelous depiction of an urban mural beyond the limits of a specific city and era.
It is also characteristic of his anxiety at the end of his life, as expressed in a letter to the Mayor of Paris, not to lose the detailed record of spaces, the significance of which he perceived more through his photographic transformation than through their historical value.
A photograph has neither materiality nor uniqueness. These belong to painting. A painting makes you feel the painter's hand at the moment of creation.
It is unique and carries its time. A photograph is simply an image. If you enlarge it indefinitely, everything will disappear into grains of gray. This makes it poorer but also more mysterious and perhaps for the same reason you cannot gaze at a photograph for a long time. You must look at it again and again, just like a line of poetry.
Our contemporary German Thomas Struth speaks of today's cities from which he has completely removed any trace of human presence.
As if we were to remove the blood from a body. Atget's buildings imply human presence or turn into valuable objects. However, Struth's huge, frozen constructions, through deliberately fragmentary forms, seem to deny human presence. As if they appeared there after some disaster. A disaster not apparent since the buildings are intact and grand, but subterranean and insidious.