If the photo is not good enough, you are not close enough
Today I met with Korean Publishers. It was fun. Like a sort of bookish speed-dating. I wore a pretty dress and blushed occasionally as is my wont.
Afterwards I happened across a Robert Capa retrospective. I walked through his life through his photographs (often war photography, sometimes not). Paris, Spain, China, Spain, Russia, Israel, New York, Japan, Vietnam. What fascinated me most was not the composition, the historical significance or the action of the shots but the few people in the crowd who looked directly at the lens: amused, flattered, angered, playful, suspicious. One woman out of focus at the back of a dancing crowd, serious as a ghost.
They showed a full-length documentary of his life which painted a picture of a man who loved his work above all else, built his whole life around it. He chose the solitude of newness and unique adventures. I watched him transit the same countries again - this time learning about the love, grief, anger and loneliness that accompanied these places. And, of course, the adventure, friendship, fleeting moments of intense feeling captured in less than a second. Whole worlds frozen still at his insistence.
I thought, this is an admirable life. A life I would like to lead. And I realised in my small way I was - a stranger in a foreign place. I am a photographer in my own way. My memory the film, my imagination the filter, the over or under-development, the curator of those images, people and places I capture.
That made me so happy, made fulfillment closer than I imagined it might be when I woke this morning. Here’s a Capa picture of Picasso and son, to squeeze the heart in a fist…
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