The art of seeing

Through an article in the Portuguese press, I’ve just noticed that Henri Cartier-Bresson would have just turned 100 years old if he was still alive. A quick search led me to countless photo galleries and biographies. This post won’t add another one...

To me, Bresson is simply a very strong reason to love photography. Not because he was a technical master using his famous Leica but, on the contrary, because he was able to reduce photography to the art of seeing and choosing the right moment to bring to life a still image. Learning to see means choosing what to include and exclude in a picture, finding the perspective and the point of view to tell a story. Everything else are technical details, needed but clearly less important.

Any photographer can easily get lost in the “equipment vertigo”: more megapixels, a “mightier” zoom, a “better” lens... But any camera is just an extension to the human eye, just as Cartier-Bresson said more than 50 years ago. I could add that the more natural that extension becomes, the greater is the photographer’s ability to see. Browsing though Cartier-Bresson’s portraits in “An Inner Silence” anyone can witness that no could see as clearly as him...