In one of his interviews, the famous photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson recollects how Gandhi had asked him to elucidate the meaning of a photograph that Bresson had taken. It was the image of an aged Paul Claudel, the French poet. “I explained Claudel was a great Catholic poet… a man at the end of his life walking past a hearse with his eyes slightly crossed. Gandhi said: “Death, death, death.” Three times. He shut the book, (pause) he left for his prayers and he got shot,” he said.
Cartier-Bresson is one of the most revered of the photographers in the history of the visual art, and a new exhibition of his works in Paris brings home why. His image of a man skip-hopping from a plank in a puddle is one that’s etched in the collective consciousness of every photographer and enthusiast. About that image, Cartier-Bresson had once said the camera was placed through a hole where only the lens could go in. So he couldn’t see anything through the viewfinder and the photograph, as it is today, is a sheer footprint of luck:
“It’s always luck. It’s luck that matters. Like the relationship between things, it’s a matter of chance. If you want it, you get nothing. Just be receptive and it happens.”
For the photographer, form was the most essential factor. And light, “like a perfume” which metaphorically distills the frame with a sweeter smell.
Cartier-Bresson spent more than a year in India, during the decisive moment when a new chapter in history was being written, during 1947-1948. Along with portraits of Nehru, Gandhi and Jinnah, he took his joy in geometry while traveling across the country taking pictures of bull fighting, of refugee camps and Gandhi’s funeral. Thus, his relation to India is a very special one. It was as if he stood next to India when she suffered the labour pain of giving birth to an independent nation. “The camera is a weapon — you can’t prove anything but at the same time it is a weapon… you see, the camera can be a machine gun, it can be a psychoanalytical couch, it can be a warm kiss, it can be a sketchbook,” he had said.
Perhaps in Indian context his camera was gesture, which asked to endure.
And like an old sage, when he said, “Let things age,” perhaps we realise that age has proved benevolent towards his works, and quite rightly so.
