"Life isn't made of stories that you cut into pieces like an apple pie," said legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. "There's no standard way of approaching a story. We have to evoke a situation, a truth. This is the poetry of life's reality." An ambitious statement of intent, and one that may overlook two important facts - passion and enchantment, were it not for Cartier-Bresson's expressed vision, "To take photographs is to put one's head, one's heart and one's eye on the same axis."
Now perhaps, his idealism, that post-war urge to fashion a brave new world seems naive. In our image-obsessed, image weary age, we know better. Suddenly we're all photographers. We all know that, from advertising to family albums, photographs can lie. "The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality," said Susan Sontag, "And eventually in one's own."
For a medium so bound up in the temporal, freezing the moment for an eternity, snapping the shutter in tiny fractions of seconds, time has treated the photographic image harshly. When it first appeared in the 1820's its capacity to reproduce reality was viewed with awe. Now we take it all with a pinch of salt. Somewhere along the line Cartier-Bresson's 'truth' was tarnished. Photography lost its credibility - lost its soul. And yet without question, the mass production of digital images and their almost instant dissemination via the internet and other media, raises the interest and following in photography to new heights.
For me, the desire to connect with subject material is all-powerful. At the meeting with a new, fresh photographic model Naomi, I was struck with her grace and charm. Spellbound, I put my head, heart and eye on the same axis and prepared to photograph her. The strengths and integrity that lay within her emerged. In the gentleness of the Worcestershire countryside, seasonal colour provided a backdrop astoundingly beautiful. Rain threatened and skies full of dark swirling clouds raced past. Cartier-Bresson's truth was re-established as the shutter closed each time. Bewitching, vital moments occurred, and a photographic story developed of poetry of life's reality.
Martin Billings
Acknowledgements: Myles Quin, writer and photographer.