Cartier-Bresson, who is ageless, noted with amusement that I tore off the latest page from my desk calendar and revealed my birthday, making me a paltry sixty-seven.
“Pablo,” as he persists in calling me, “you are yet a stripling, as your first post to this blog risibly showed.”
“C-B,” I said wearily, “regardless of whatever your greatness as a photographer may be, you are betrayed by your lack of empathy.”
“Pablo, Pablo, . . . ,” C-B answered, “you are hardly the first to think you can take photographs and imagine them to be paintings. They are not. A photograph is a photograph, deprived of the painter’s wielding of the brush, the nuanced moment when he—or let’s allow she—may swerve from what is called reality and find a part of the truth distinctly apart from the ho-hum quotidian hard-and-fast facts of life.”
“Really?” I asked of C-B. “When you frame the decisive moment of a passing scene, aren’t you seeing something more than a fragment of time? And doesn’t that mean you are like the painter who isolates a series of brushstrokes and calls them collectively an image that matters?”
“Really, Pablo,” C-B answered, “you take these matters far too seriously. You are an OK taker of images, some of which tell us more than what a patch of color or a vague shape may fleetingly convey. You are, however, far from wresting from the constant flow of things a moment we can say is above the flux, an image of key constancy. Believe me, it will continue to be for you like the ever-receding wave on the horizon tantalizingly out of your reach. You are yet a stripling, not a true capturer of the moment when time and chance intersect and provide us with the this that is the exact that.”
“C-B,” I said, “much as I admire the exactitude of your art, you can be exasperatingly certain that you know better than anyone else what makes a moment freeze from the inexorable passage of time and demand our attention. You are, instead, the luckily perceptive passive eye that after many dozens of takes discovers he has found a gaunt woman garbed partly in an American flag pointing to something outside the frame she is angry about. Truly, lucky you.”
“No, Pablo, that is not so,” C-B asserted decisively. “I saw that mad woman in one moment as her bony arm pointed to what outraged her so, even though I didn’t know what it was. What mattered to me was the moment of the woman’s ultimate self-exposure.”
“OK, C-B,” I nodded wearily, knowing full well he was far beyond me as a measurer of moments deserving to be memorialized in photographs.
“Pablo,” C-B kindly said, “you are as yet a work in progress. That is as it should be. Even if I live to 617 years, my camera still will not have caught a truly decisive moment. Only its approximation.”