Instant Moment Thursday August 11, 2005
I always found Cartier-Bresson’s idea of the photographic ‘decisive moment’ wonderfully suggestive. It’s most obviously relevant in relation to journalistic work, implying the moment when a piece of editorial is amplified and encapsulated with an appropriate image. But more than that, for me it means an implicit aesthetic that you discover by a receptive sensitivity rather than invasive technique. I find it delicately related to two oriental sources: the divination method of the I Ching, and the literary simplicity of the haiku.
The I Ching is a philosophical book that you access not by linear or even random reading, but a ritualised process of consultation. The traditional method involves casting yarrow stalks onto the ground, but most people use coins which, depending on whether the head or tail side is uppermost, create binary configurations which lead to one of 64 hexagrams, where you find an appropriate commentary. This is not the place to rationalise or explain this ancient practice, but I will mention the fact that Carl Jung used the I Ching extensively, and its underlying philosophy ties in with modern ideas like chaos theory and pattern recognition.
An I Ching consultation is a way of externalising your own interior intuitive knowledge. You could call this an example of Jungian projection, in relation to 64 archetypes. A ‘decisive moment’ photograph reverses this process; your interior world appears in the form of a snapshot of an external environment. If you are interested in the I Ching, this is an intriguing possibility at two levels. It means your thoughts and feelings at the decisive moment are subjected to philosophical scrutiny. Some levels of the mind are mechanical and obvious, and we can describe ‘what we were thinking’ in fairly uninteresting ways. Other levels of the mind are subtle and subconscious, which a photograph might illuminate and amplify. You are not a totally conscious force in your life; it sometimes follows channels which perplex more than ressure, that puzzle and confound more than they elucidate. The reason why old stories like Oedipus Rex fascinated Freud is because they exemplified his ideas about the unconscious mind: we walk along paths driven by desires and motivations we do not realise exist. A ‘decisive moment’ photograph is a configuration of time, place and aesthetic which can be personally revealing. Photographer Alfred Steiglitz meant something like this in his idea of the ‘equivalent’, whereby a photo reveals and expresses an interior state.
Beyond the phenomenology of taking the picture, you are presented with material for psychological reflection. The photographic configuration summarises a moment in time and, as with the I Ching process, meaning is encapsulated in that moment which extends beyond its temporal significance; you may be able to ‘read’ your photographs as a process of self discovery.
The haiku is also related to momentary interior process. It is an attempt to capture wider and poetic meaning within an apparently simple form. Zen writer RH Blyth defined a haiku as “the expression of a temporary enlightenment in which we see into the life of things” (Suzuki 1959: Zen And Japanese Culture, 228). The most famous Zen haiku practitioner is probably Basho, who wrote the following famous lines:
The old pond.
A frog jumps in –
Plop!
Whether you respond to this poetic form or not is a matter of personal taste, but it is possible to relate it to photographic practice. Roland Barthes makes this comparison in his Camera Lucida (1981). He defined what he called the ‘studium’ and the ‘punctum’ which are essentially the surface and immaterial layer of representation, and the personal and associative i.e. meaningful layer of interpretation. Any photograph contains these two levels; Barthes explored this in relation to images of deceased people he’d known and loved. This is also how a haiku operates: suggesting another and more subtle level of meaning implied in simple surface phenomena. The haiku traditionally refers to nature, implying rhythm, order or intelligence in an apparently unconscious or banal scenario. A frog jumping into water is nothing to get excited about but, to paraphrase Romantic poet William Blake, we can learn to see infinity in a grain of sand. Meaning, in other words, extrapolates from ordinary phenemena.