This photo by Cartier Bresson of the 'Fair at Trone' has an image of Cupid aiming its bow at the man at the desk. At that simultaneous moment a discussion going on in the foreground: two women whispering with a sense of excitement. Is it about love? A story is conjured. The mind's imagination thinks of more, sees more.
Foire au Trone, Cartier-Bresson
Just as how Henri Cartier-Bresson has created his photos, the lover, in meeting its love object can create also create a love story. Misfortune and adversity doesn't have to be seen as ends. In them lie lessons, possibility and opportunity, dissolving the crusts of limescale of years of ego and toxic,old behaviours for the trueness and spontaneity of love.
Any lover can use the following practice of Cartier-Bresson's with his own creativity for their own love life. Here are eight aspects to his work:
1. A sense of adventure
Bresson travelled the world and had adventures in different places and other people He used the practice of 'mindfulness' so that living must be with a fresh outlook, in the moment. He does not allow his past to blemish the clarity of his present
2 The zen archer
He famously said: "a photograph offers itself. It is the photo that takes you, not you that takes the photo"
Like an archer with bow and arrow, he shoots at his 'moment'. He has a confidence in coincidence, reading 'The Roots of Coincidence' by Arthur Koestler. Life is inside of him and he is responds to life outside of him using this interior. He is so acutely in tune, that trigger happy as he is, it is almost as if the target of his arrow is what comes to him to be be shot at, almost as if he knows it is about to happen.
3 Nurturing a sense of intuition and follows coincidence and opportunity
He has captured the most opportune moments, and it is not just for their celebrity that he photographs a person, but because he is simply 'moved' to lift the camera to his eye and click at that time. "If my visual appetite is not stimulated, the camera never comes up to my eye" he said, when asked why he did not photograph Nureyev.
Cartier Bresson strolled the world, responding to his 'coincidences' with the confidence of a mythical hero, a Ulysses. His sensory perception is as acute as a princess and a pea, able to perceive a pea beneath the thick mattresses on the bed. It was the nurturing, through his work as a photojournalist, of his intuition that helped him develop his art so that it almost became 'artless'.
4 Listening to impulses of joy and love
Charles Chaplin once said "In silence, our inner voice is available to everyone, but 99 percent of us don't listen to it"If we listen to inner silence and heed its impulses, we can nurture a spiritual life.
Bresson believed that it was important to dismantle the structures we are given by society and re-invent our own. He was keen to search for his own personality by means of revolting agains everything that symbolised bourgeois order and values. He said that at the military school he attended "any spontaneous movement risked being transformed into a bruise"
5 Good observation and the 'act of seeing'
He looked so carefully at life, almost with the eye of an entomologist. He noticed the richness of life: boats, villages, prostitutes, factories. He has a passion for people and places, using the tool of his camera to preserve in time in a 'shrine' of a beautiful image of life, where all life was precious, which memory would not always preserve. Curious incidents seemed to walk into his path, as if called, and it seemed as if photography became a 'sense' allowing his attention to be placed on pure perception.
Borges once had to pass on an award to another artist and said to Bresson: "That will be you because you can see and I can no longer see" Having read the famous last lines of Joyce in 'Ulysses' "To see is everything" Bresson firmly believed photography meant: "perceiving, looking, remembering, imagining, projecting, desiring and rejoicing"
6 A discipline and preparation
'Geometric rules' were highly important to him and he carefully set up and framed his paintings. He was interested in the theoretician of composition, André Lhote, who studied golden rules and proportions. Once he had found a 'scene' and set up his camera and taken aim, he would then wait for what movement would come into his lare. He would capture coincidence in a frame he had carefully prepared, making his art a combination of skill and chance. He always believed in art being part chance, once having given his camera to a monkey, whose photo was also 'not bad at all' Overall he was a firm believer that photography was a combination of mind, heart and eye.
7 The invention of his own religion
And he concluded that "God" is an invention of man. His passions lay rather in Greek mythology and paganism. He admired as his muses Terpsichore (dance), Clio (history), Erato (lyrical poetry) Urania (astronomy), Apollo (bow) and Ulysses (traveller) and preferred the discussions of Louis Aragon, who said, in 'The Disorder of Memory' "The renunciation of all masquerade is a process that is over-poweringly attractive for the true lover"
He invented a 'religion of love' saying that his photographs heeded joy and love
"I am a pack of nerves while waiting for the moment, and this feeling grows and grows and then it explodes, it is a physical joy, a dance of space and time reunited"
8 The dissipation of judgement
He sees the subjects as an 'is' without judgments shown. In love, there is always a danger to see the world through a 'scar' where the amyglia (the emotional brain, set in its ways during childhood) has full sway, often trapping intuition and spontaneity by ego games and old reactions and behaviour patterns. We listen to a drug, a fear, a parent, an arrogant or prejudiced friend but never listen to our intuition.
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