On my way to the talk I was thinking “the Cartier‑Bresson drag again, is there no one else to talk about?” but since the speaker was Pepe Baeza I decided to go and it was worth it, the presentation was engaging and the topic made me review everything I think about photography. The fascination that everyone seems to have for Henri Cartier‑Bresson has made me tired. Is photography just an instant? William Klein said a photographer’s life is a few seconds, the sum of hundreds of moments at 1/125 s. How many photographs do you get to know from a photographer? I wondered how much you know about their life in 1 second, 2…?
I understand that a certain type of photography yields to the moment, but the cult of HCB seems disproportionate. When I first saw A View From an Apartment I was fascinated, even more so when I learned that Jeff Wall had rented the apartment and kept a model living there for almost a year to make the photograph. There is definitely more to photography than “the decisive moment”.
But this “rage” comes more from the HCB brand than from his photography or his thinking. Being realistic, without marketing nothing succeeds and HCB did an excellent marketing of his work, so much so that he became a god of photography and that bothers me.
One of Pepe’s phrases was what just unleashed my fury, a recurring one in talks and all “artistic” conversations about photography: “coherence”. What does it mean to be coherent? From what I’ve come to understand, being coherent is something like being useless, that is, doing the same thing all your life, and also defending it. One thing is transcending a stage of your artistic development, like cubism, but another, very different, is having used only one technique throughout your career. If after 10 years of doing the same you don’t do it at least well or you haven’t invented a “discourse” to sell it, you’re too useless, that is, you don’t even become coherent.
Ah! By the way, Cindy Sherman is also coherent! And she’s even smarter, letting the discourse be written for her while she keeps playing at disguising herself in front of the camera, as she used to do as a hobby at teenage parties…
All these tantrums have one thing in common, the art market. Being “coherent” is the only way to be sellable. The market is short‑sighted, it doesn’t understand unless it can categorize. Having “a style”, “being recognizable”, “being a brand” and the best way to achieve it is to always do the same.
Guillermo, a victim of my existential doubts, told me he was looking for geniuses, not photographers… come on, “the pearl slipped from me”… Maybe I’m asking too much. I’m one of those who believe in the search, I’m used to seeing retrospectives of artists who have done everything in their life and throughout their life.
What would happen if Metallica started playing Sardanas? Would they let them? Would they know? Don’t worry, the record label won’t let them.
What I didn’t expect was the relation with Buddhism, that changed my boredom‑hate relationship with HCB into an love‑hate one. This is what made me publish this post with so much delay. Pepe got me to read
Photographing from the Natural and
Zen in the Art of Archery and meditate on how I photograph, how I look, I have looked and want to look.
The result is
Intuitive Photography.
Originally published in Barcelona Photobloggers