the daily flashkube

Portraits of celebrities and models do not interest me generally. Henri Cartier-Bresson, though, was a master at capturing spontaneity, a fly on the wall. This book quotes him as saying, “When I went to see Matisse, I sat in a corner and didn’t move; we didn’t speak to each other. It was as if we didn’t exist.” Bresson himself did not like the camera turned on him because, “once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of ‘posing’, I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image.” This is the double-bind of “trying” to be spontaneous. On the same topic he is quoted as saying,

In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art.

One can gather from these quotes Bresson’s style without ever having looked at his portraits. He seems to despise the contrived, the self-concious. He was willing to shoot even before introductions or wait quietly for hours if necessary until the right moment, until his subject’s inner silence showed itself. Below are a few of my favorites from this collection.

(shot with a blackberry curve)

This one is of the surrealist painter Joan Miro. I am fascinated by this image because of the subject’s posture and the gesture he is making with his right hand. It is hard to tell whether the phallic shapes in the paintings behind him and his pointing from the waist are coincidence or intentional. I also like it because I am somewhat frightened by the uncanny resemblance of Miro to Hannibal Lecter as played by Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs.

(shot with a blackberry curve)

On the left is HCB’s portrait of Alfred Stieglitz. On the right is an image of Lewis Carroll that appears sometimes on my Kindle when it is powered off. I could not help but feel a resemblance between the two. It is not just their hand positions and the cloths they are clutching, but their gaze that makes these images strangely similar.

(shot with a blackberry curve)

A few of the portraits chosen for this collection do not have celebrities as their subjects. This one was simply titled “Los Angeles.” I found it interesting that the woman is depicted as if she were a glamorous movie star. This image could be mistaken as a poster for a film. I also think the man looks a lot like Benicio del Toro whom I admire as an actor.

(shot with a blackberry curve)

This one is titled Zurich and I like it just because.