Known and Strange Things Read online

  Alex Webb put it to me this way: “The humility of [Images à la sauvette]—which suggests the uncertainty and mystery of collaborating with the world as a street photographer—seems more in the spirit of Cartier-Bresson’s photography. As he once said, ‘It is the photo that takes you.’ ” To limit Cartier-Bresson’s photos to just a single moment misses the point. Webb said Cartier-Bresson allowed him to see that there are “often multiple potential moments to discover in many situations—and that different photographers will find different moments.”

  There’s no single right answer, just as there’s no photographic formula. Each successful picture taken on the sly by Cartier-Bresson was one original solution to a set of circumstances he was encountering for the first time. Consider, for instance, a lesser-known photograph he made in Shanghai’s Suzhou Creek in 1949. The piles of bundled wood, the fanned-out ends of the poles, the standing figures, the curved prows of the canoes: each element contributes to the kaleidoscopic coherence of the image. The long shafts of the poles create new rectangles inside the larger one that frames the picture. These smaller rectangles are close to square in their dimensions (squares tilted on their axes). Were a rectangle sketched around the pensive figure in the foreground, it, too, would approximate a square. The feeling of harmony in many photographs by Cartier-Bresson, this one included, comes in part from this ability to see and capture a scene’s native repetitions of shape or gesture.

  Cartier-Bresson’s oeuvre, his reportorial as well as aesthetic achievements, laid the ground for future photojournalists. Maggie Steber, for instance, credits him with giving her a way to think about style, content, and construction. But then, as any mature artist must, she moved into her own visual language. In her photograph of a funeral in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1987, an exquisitely balanced composition is further strengthened by the judicious color: light blue, dark blue, and brown. The main mourner’s gesture, his powerful arms outstretched, echoes that of the figure of Christ on the cross behind him.

  The picture’s structure is sustained by intersecting lines. The man’s head and left arm form a diagonal; a rectangle set off from this diagonal would contain the main action of the photograph. In the background are other crosses. Even the streetlamp is a half-finished cross. These crosses are like individual instruments taking up a musical theme. A roof at the left emphasizes the main diagonal and a glance from the second most prominent man in the picture, which parallels it. The pale-shirted shoulders from which the dark-suited mourner emerges form a radiating arrangement, and the bent elbows to the left and right are like parentheses around this group of helpers.

  Beginning photographers are often tempted to reduce photography to rigid rules. The rule of thirds—thinking of the picture plane in terms of a grid made of three equal vertical and three equal horizontal divisions, with the points of interest placed at the intersections of these lines—is a common starting point. More sophisticated is the golden ratio (two quantities are said to be in a golden ratio if the ratio of the larger to the smaller is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger). Imagine a triptych in which the center is about 0.618 as wide as each of the wings. Because this ratio is often found in nature, it is credited as the mathematical logic behind many efficient and visually pleasing phenomena: certain flower petals, or mollusk shells, or spiral galaxies. These codes can be helpful for looking. But the reality is that there is usually a much more improvisatory and flexible mathematical order at play in a successful photograph.

  A bright afternoon in 1986. Alex Webb is on the streets of Bombardopolis, a town in northwestern Haiti. That afternoon is long gone now, but a photograph Webb made that day remains. A woman stands in a blue frock and a red head scarf. An enormous cigarette floating next to her face turns out to be in the mouth of a man in deep shadow in the foreground. In the middle distance are a donkey’s ears, and little else of the donkey. Farther back is a boy, neatly contained in the frame created by a bamboo pole on one side and a painted wall on the other. He is in silhouette, and he appears to be looking at the photographer (and therefore at us, who share the photographer’s view). There are other people in the picture: a man in profile on the left; another little boy, only his head visible, peeking just below the silhouetted boy; a woman in a patterned red and blue cloth standing in a doorway with her back to us. The plaster has flaked off the wall on the right to reveal a shape as pointed and angular as the donkey’s ears.

  In Steber’s picture of the funeral, there is a miraculous unity of action. She described to me how it came about: “Like an orchestra playing a dramatic symphony, everything crescendoed at the same time. The dead woman’s son, without warning, suddenly rose up in anguish in the painful last cry of a son saying goodbye forever to his mother, and just as the last rays of sun fell on his face.” The opposite is true in Webb’s picture. There is no dramatic highlight; no one interacts with or even looks at anyone else. The only communicative glance is from the two boys, outward, toward us. And yet the anomie of an afternoon in the 1980s in a small, hot Haitian town is given, in this photograph, uncanny, indelible, and exact form.

  Webb’s is perhaps not a picture Cartier-Bresson would have liked very much, as he was skeptical of color and strong shadows. But for Webb, everything is fair game: color, shadows, a silhouette, a rock, a wall, a cigarette, a donkey’s ears, a saddle, a signboard, a hand here, a head there. Despite this freedom, everything is in its right place. Notice the repetition of an elongated rectangle: the door, the doorway, the vertical sections of wall, the lower edge of the window. Then there are the implied polygons around key figures: the silhouetted boy, the woman in the red scarf, the donkey’s ears. The same elongated rectangle, or at least one related to it by ratio, appears in various sizes and in various disguises in free geometric play throughout the picture plane.

  The success of certain pictures—pictures that make the viewer say, “Damn it,” and wonder how such things are possible—comes from a combination of tutored intuition and good luck. Could Munkácsi, Cartier-Bresson, Steber, or Webb have considered some matters of pictorial complexity at the moment they made their pictures? No question about it. But could they have seen every element at the moment they pressed the shutter? Impossible. The photographer has to be there to begin with, tuned in and tuned up, active, asking a family for permission to attend a funeral in Port-au-Prince, following a man and a donkey down the road in Bombardopolis. The rest is fate.

  Disappearing Shanghai

  PHOTOGRAPHY DOES NOT share music’s ability to be fully remade each time it is presented. It does not have film’s durational quality, in which the illusion of a present continuous tense is conjured. A photograph shows what was, and is no more. It registers, in pixels or in print, the quality and variety of light entering an aperture during a specific length of time. There are no instantaneous photographs: each must be exposed for a length of time, no matter how brief: in this sense, every photograph is a time-lapse image, and photography is necessarily an archival art.

  There are certain oeuvres within the history of photography in which this archival pressure is felt more intensely than in others. Eugène Atget’s façades, architectural ornaments, and street corners depicted a Paris that was, even while his work was ongoing, already passing away from view. Atget’s images have a sense of speaking out from a buried visual subconscious, a sense aided by but not wholly dependent on the depopulated views he preferred, and by the melancholia of the sepia tone bestowed by time. The other part of the charge of the images comes from what we know about the places they depict: chiefly that those places are gone.

  A similar embedded charge can be felt in all the photographs presented in Disappearing Shanghai, a book of photographs by Howard French. French is a journalist of unusually broad expertise: he was bureau chief for The New York Times in several countries, and has had many years of experience reporting from Africa, the Caribbean, Central America, and Asia. His work as a photographer is less well known: the selection in Disappearing Sha
nghai marks the first appearance of that aspect of his work in book form.

  It might be assumed that French is one of those dilettantes who, unwilling to leave well enough alone, insist on dabbling in areas beyond their specialization: a writer of well-received books and articles turning his attention to something less taxing, something easy, like the occasional snapshot. But there is much more going on in these images than hobbyism. They indicate intent, thought, order. They provoke questioning, demanding from us what all good photographs do, which is that they be placed in some relation to the wider practice of photography and to the ethics and possibilities of the form.

  Disappearing Shanghai is a visual account of five years’ worth of shooting in the rapidly changing back streets, homes, and alleys of China’s largest city. The project originated during French’s time living in Shanghai as a Times reporter, and developed side by side with that work. The instinct that brought these images to the surface (it seems natural to think of them as having been submerged) was that of a flâneur. Around the time that he began to learn Chinese, French also started to go on long walks in the less glitzy areas of the city: the older areas, the more traditional areas, precisely those parts of the city that were beginning to be effaced by the economic boom. He began to take photos of the people he met. Soon, he was invited into their homes.

  The photos that resulted are notably different from what we might ordinarily think of as photojournalism: they are dynamic but are not the action-packed singles of the kind that win photojournalism prizes. There is something far more patient at work in them. We feel that the photographer has not so much captured a “decisive moment” as gained us admission into private moments of long duration. Many of the images project the longueurs that are, after all, a substantial part of regular life: unhurried, unharried, the part of life that isn’t caught up in working for pay, the part of life that is a straight catalogue of the passing minutes.

  Many of the photos in Disappearing Shanghai rescue a peaceful time of day—just before lamplight—from the heart of one of the world’s brashest and fastest-growing conurbations. These Chinese faces and selves bring to mind the work of another archivist of the passing scene, August Sander. In the work Sander produced around and just following the First World War, he created a catalogue of images that stood in for an entire generation in Weimar Germany. Farmers, cooks, stevedores, teachers, priests, and manual laborers were all represented in their full dignity, and Sander achieved something like a double portraiture in each case, because each actual individual was at the same time a representative type.

  This ability to be at once universal and yet ineluctably particular made John Berger ask, of Sander’s images, just what it was the photographer told each of his subjects that made them all believe him in the same way. In a related fashion, the portraits of Disappearing Shanghai show people as their real and undisguised selves, so that one almost suspects that French has brought each subject into his confidence in the same way, so that each is unable to be before the camera other than he or she is in the absence of the camera. At the same time, these are also photographs of people in a story, players on a stage about which they might only be faintly aware, and the story they tell is of a world that is passing, and will soon be past.

  The old man sitting down on the street and looking lost in front of a ruined building, a little boy sitting before a tricycle with his legs ostentatiously crossed, an infant unimpressed with the dinner his mother presents him. There are the moments in which French has been granted admission into small, cluttered apartments: an old lady with an image of her ancestor (or perhaps it is her deceased husband) on the wall behind her; a couple seated on bunks, between whom an enormous silence looms. They are all there in their entirety, even though we do not know their names or speak their language. The photographer’s lens introduces them. They are intact, quiet, complex. They have all believed him in the same way.

  Howard French came to photography early, shooting Olympus SLRs while he was still in high school, and already in those years was working in a darkroom built by his father. A signal event had occurred when he was a mere boy: he had seen a photograph someone had made of his younger brother. French recounts that he was astonished by this image, which seemed to contain not only his brother’s appearance but also the entire context of sights, sounds, and emotions out of which the image was drawn: “It turned out to be one of the most revealing portraits I’ve seen, and even the summer heat, and Jamie’s beading sweat, and an air of urgency, as if our mother had beckoned him to come home right away, or else, are all intensely palpable.”

  This description contains an honest love of the world of memories and experience (and strongly evokes one of Leonard Freed’s photos of boys at play in the streets of New York). It is a sensibility at home in the layers of a moment, and in this early experience was sown the seed that would inspire French’s later photography, which went on to span several countries, notably in Africa and in Asia. He learned a great deal from watching his photojournalist colleagues, but waywardness was to become his dominant note. His system is footloose and unsystematic, and the images that result are as in love with the world of surfaces, persons, and places as the writings of Walter Benjamin or Walt Whitman were. In a descriptive, inventorial passage that could have been lifted from Benjamin’s memoir of Naples, French writes about the situations he encountered photographing Shanghai:

  …the songbirds and the crickets lovingly raised in their cages, the street markets and the foods, with their smells and colors that change so suddenly and so crisply according to the season, the eternal tending of laundry from long bamboo poles, the wildly screeching bicycle brakes, the lusty throat clearing, the world weary lounging about on beach chairs and in pajamas, the very appearance of the people’s faces, weathered by a century of immense and often brutal change, like the old man in the faded Mao suit I saw on a street corner this afternoon looking for the life of him like an apparition lost amid the onrush of the new.

  French’s images are freed from the dramatic needs of a news report. With a quiet testimonial force, they bring us the deeper drama of mundane life. The cumulative effect of the images, all taken in the same half dozen neighborhoods of the city, is of how rich the substance of human experience is, and how reliably it is to be found side by side with an inevitable insubstantiality.

  Touching Strangers

  A PHOTOGRAPH IS NOTHING but surface. On this two-dimensional plane is presented, with areas of dark and light and sometimes color, an illusion of narrative depth. We know that abstraction is possible in photography, as is manipulative postprocessing, but in the case of most unaltered photos—landscapes, portraits, photojournalism—we rightly assume that the photograph’s relationship with life is straightforward. We take it on trust that things are as they seem. These viewing habits, which serve us so well in most cases, make us tense and interested when we look at Richard Renaldi’s photographs in Touching Strangers.

  The portraits in the book all came about in a similar fashion. In a public place in one or another American city or town, Renaldi asked a stranger to allow his or her photograph to be taken. Another stranger was then asked to pose with the first stranger, and the pair were photographed together, not simply in terms of occupying the same frame, but in close physical proximity to each other. Often these strangers had to be cajoled by the photographer to hold each other, to embrace, to touch. The photos are not first takes. It took time to get the right closeness and an interesting-enough interaction between the strangers. Sometimes the number of subjects was three, or four. Some of the latter, the quadruple portraits, can only be described as “family photographs”: we have no other vocabulary than the familial for images like those which show a man, a woman, and two children posed in a close group.

  When we sit at a café or in a restaurant, we pretend to be wholly focused on our food and our companions, but we spend some of our time imagining the lives of the people around us all the time. Those two men holding hands a few ta
bles over: How long have they been together? Why is the woman at that table over there crying quietly into her napkin? What will the suspiciously older man seated with her do about it? Is he her father or her lover? And the anxious woman who has been alone at the bar for a while now: What’s happening with her? Has her date stood her up? Or is that her job, to wait until some generous stranger takes interest? We do this habitually, making up stories about other people, and, at the same time, they are certainly making up stories about us. Stories of these kinds—about love and about the uncertainties between people—are the kinds of stories suggested by the portraits in Touching Strangers.

  “Fine photography is literature,” Walker Evans wrote, “and it should be.” The narrative force in Renaldi’s fine pictures comes out of the way their calm surfaces suddenly open out to the most intense and troubling themes of contemporary life. It is possible to imagine this idea deployed in a less successful way: quick snapshots of strangers smiling together, a sentimental record of a walk down a crowded street, with no great insight or resonance in the resulting pictures. Something quite different happens in Renaldi’s pictures. His subjects have been asked to briefly subvert their expectations about personal space and public propriety. In their bodies we read a large number of silent signals, often more than one present in each person: performance, tension, submission, affection, rigidity, unhappiness, comedy, sexuality, embarrassment, boredom, relief.

  Any society is governed by the invisible perimeter fence of its taboos. Benign touch from a stranger is allowed when permission is granted and, usually, when some service is performed: at the doctor’s office, at the barbershop, at the masseuse or the tailor. But intimate touch of the romantic kind is permitted not only by the mutual consent of adults but by laws and prejudices. We are still within living memory of the Loving v. Virginia case, when a black woman and her white husband had to fight the state for the legal right to be a married couple. In a historical sense, 1967 is not long ago.