Observational Report: Bresson
Bresson’s street photography captures the landscape of partition and decolonization as process through the lens of an outsider’s perspective. The “outsider” nature of Bresson’s work creates potential for hidden detail. Much like a Monet painting, when one is too close, too inside a state of being, it is hard to see a broader picture. This broader picture often carries the expectation of clarity, however, this moment in history captured by someone outside the geographical location and culture landscape creates distance, which in turn allows the viewer of these images to be lost. The images achieve this feeling by its framing. Unlike the images of Steve McCurry, where images are distilled and framed in a way in which a largely American audience can quickly and thoughtlessly consume, these images leave uncertainty as its main focus. The point of Bresson’s works are that they aren’t easily understood, that one requires research, contextualization, and time, to see its nuance.
Sight-based research requires patience and constant active thinking. One must accept that sight-based research is a slow process where answers do not come quickly and all at once, but in infrequent and subtle waves, or maybe not at all. Pre-written forms of research are an excellent resource for fast information and quick understanding but tend to rest on the periphery of one’s knowledge catalog, always waiting on the surface to be used until forced into memory, or forgotten. By contrast, bodily experiences rest in the deepest layer of consciousness, a knowledge that cultivates intuitive feeling rather than a fact that can be explained. David Foster Wallace explains this notion far more eloquently, writing that, “the most important impressions and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another-word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second’s flash of thoughts and connections.” Bodily experiences create these types of inexplicable, permanent sentiments, leaving us to inadequate and frustrating circumlocution.
Experiences on a level this deep can by nature only be subjective. The framework in which we perceive the world, and later keep as memory, is through the physical and psychological lens of having been shaped leading up to the moment of interpreting a new piece of information. For this very reason, photography and visual documentation of any kind is important. Although it is inevitable that even the view of another’s point of view will be distorted, it will take us closer to the place of truly seeing the world from another perspective. For some reason, this world has placed a great importance on the unattainable standard of objectivity. Objectivity, based on the nature of how one is always trapped within oneself, is rare. It is unfortunate that there is no overarching third party that can show us the truth, but what we are left with is either subjectivity, the longing for the rare instance of objectivity, or the much more attainable cousin of objectivity, empathy. Viewing the world through the lens of someone else is about the shift of perspective, not the discovery of truth. It is not about trying to see what an image is, but what an image can be. McCurry’s works are so boring because we have seen what those images can be and have been all the time, Bresson’s works are exciting because they shift what we normally see, and offer another algorithm within the realm of empathy. Fortunately, much better writers have explained this concept. As Kafka puts it, “we are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell.” Sight-based research and taking the time to achieve empathy is what brings us to know the griefs and perspectives within each other. Bresson, among an innumerable amount of others, can (if we allow it) take us to that place where we stand, “before the entrance to Hell.”
