Une Tournure D'Esprit

I still do not own a copy of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment. It seems hard to get a decent copy at a reasonable price. However, Philippe Halsman’s The Creation of Photographic Ideas has been on my shelves for quite a while now. In the book opening, Halsman defines creativity and imagination as une tournure d’esprit-–or a mental attitude and ability which can be directed developed. Although this resonated strongly the first time I read the book, successive readings have let me to a different crossroad. A crossroad I am not sure how to approach. Philippe writes bluntly

“Those photographers who take pictures belong to the candid photography school. Their greatest representative is the Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson who never interferes in the action of the photographs and whose unobtrusiveness is so unique that it has created a legend that, at the moment of the picture taking, Cartier becomes invisible. Similarly, the amateur who is photographing a baby in the crib is not making a photograph but taking it. The problem of taking and making photographs are completely different. In the first case, the photographer is a witness to the occurrence; in the second case, he is its creator.”

The rest of the book is solely target to boost and develop two facets of creativity applied to photography: (1) oil the logic thinking mechanisms that help idea creation, and (2) seeding the subconscious for spontaneous blooming—or as he writes it down, stimulation. This is not much different from other creative disciplines. It also plays well with divergent and convergent thinking cycles that permeate almost all creativity literature. But all this rambling is beside the point. The main issue I run into every time I read the book again is the uncomfortable dichotomy between taking and making photographs. He goes further down the path of the dichotomy making a literature analogy.

“The photographer who takes the picture is a visual reporter. The photographer who makes one is a visual author.”

Reporters versus authors. Documentary versus fiction. The premise echoes labeling and struggles. And that is the main reason I keep rereading Halsman’s book, regardless if it makes me feel uncomfortable. The book whispers, you should take a stand. The book seems to defy you to take sides. Do you want to become a reporter or an author? It is not about the glamour, real or perceived, assigned to each of these labels. It is the struggle. The struggle that you define yourself by willingly choosing on of these two opposed worlds. It is the Aristotelian dichotomy that labels introduce in life. Do you want to take or make photographs? I do not have an answer and that is an itch hard to scratch. I guess that most of the time I have been taking pictures. Maybe, I should treat Philippe’s book as a challenge, not as a choice I have to make, but as an enriching experience. Maybe experimenting each of the rules he so clearly outlines will make the itch go away. Isn’t experience also une tournure d’esprit after all?