Windows ~ Merry Christmas
A photograph is neither taken nor seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
I was in Rome, looking out of the bathroom window, when I saw this combination of windows staring me in the face. I ran to the other room, grabbed my camera and snapped this image. Creating an image comes from the difficult task that all photographers take on themselves, the ability to gaze at that which surrounds, to look for images even in the strangest of places. There is nothing that is out of bounds when one is creating an image.
Cartier-Bresson’s point that one does not take images is important to understand. The use of the verb to take applied to photography is an unfortunate piece of standard usage in English. The implication of the usage of taking a photograph initially separated photography from all other art forms. The photograph was understood to be a means of copying that which is already there, never mind the originals were without color and photographs remain two dimensional re-presentations. Nothing is further from truth, the photograph is, and always has been, a visual re-presentation of the photographer’s vision.
The next time you are tempted to take a photograph, replace take with create and you begin to think more like a photographer.
The Windows ~ Merry Christmas by Roger Passman, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
