As Photographer

It began one evening in the fall of 1966 at a party organized to celebrate the return visit of a friend who had moved to Stockholm, Sweden. He was the darling of this group of friends, mostly graduate students at Yale. The host was studying at the Yale School of Architecture and Design. Film making was one of his specialties and it fell in place quite naturally that when the guest of honor announced he was shaving off his full, black beard that very night our host declared that the party guests would become a production company for the filming of the grand shaving of the beard.

Each guest would be the author of a separate sequence in the film, one for the preparations, one for the lathering, one for each patch of beard to be vanquished, all to be captured on black and white film, produced from the refrigerator and loaded into an 8mm Beaulieu movie camera. I was given a special role as still photographer when the host put his Nikon F in my hands and told me to document the production. Apart from a short time in my junior high school years when I dabbled in photography (following briefly in my father's footsteps, made convenient by his darkroom at home) I had no particular qualification for the job, but I accepted it enthusiastically, giddy, even, at having an expensive 35 mm in hand.

These ingredients, a good camera and a role that combined journalism and art, proved intoxicating. I fell into it with abandon. One more item added to the power of this emotional cocktail and raised it to the level of life-changing: a small book of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson from my host's book shelf.

This little book was a doorway into a world rich with possibilities. I understood that many people who knew about these things considered Cartier-Bresson's photos to be real art, not just visual records. HC-B had a well thought-out philosophy of photography as art which he spelled out in the preface of his greatest book, The Decisive Moment, which I met some time later. It combined a rigorous aesthetic of composition in which the image is a container and the picture plane like a painter's canvas. The photographer chooses where to situate the camera, adjusts the attitude of the camera and watches a flux of compositions, playing out in time. Pressing the shutter captures the composition, ideally at the optimal time, which he called the decisive moment.

As a boy I had yearned to make art, which I equated with drawing and painting. My yearning was always frustrated by a lack of apparent aptitude and the lack of a good teacher. I was jealous of a good friend who had aptitude and some accomplishment to show for it. But I couldn't draw and believed that it took a native talent, given from birth, and if you didn't have it, you would never acquire it. Since I showed no such flair for the visual I accepted that I should not struggle against my ineptitude.

It was exactly the idea that a camera could substitute for drawing that started HC-B on his own quest. Here was a means to capture a composition every bit as powerful as the one made by an artist's hands, without mastering the technique of the instrument, whatever it might be, pencil, charcoal, stylus, brush. In place of the manual skills was a set of social skills more like those of novelists and short story writers, the skill of recognizing what constitutes human traffic, what best represents the human condition.

HC-B was known for his apparent invisibility while he worked, his knack for placing himself in the midst of human drama without disturbing it. All of these appealed to me on a deep level. I consumed every photo of his that I could locate, pouring over each of them again and again, the obscure ones just as much as the obvious bull's eyes. His mystique was commanding, ranging from the details of his technique to his very physical appearance, which he kept secret by not allowing others to photograph him.

After that party I began photographing with borrowed cameras and using the school darkroom to develop and print photographs. Then I bought a Nikon F, a single lens reflex camera with built-in light meter, and two lenses, a 50mm and a 105mm. I took my first really memorable photo in the spring of 1967, four boys playing in a stream, each poised in mid-action; one leaping, one log rolling one leaning and one straining with a net. It's full of life and has the feeling of frozen time: the boys will live as boys forever in that image.

Coincidentally, I learned just recently, it was a photo of three boys rushing into the waters of Lake Tanganyika that convinced HC-B that a camera could make great art by capturing life and freezing the flux for all time.

HC-B was known to work with minimal gear comprising a Leica and two or three lenses. No flash (firing a flash gun at your subject was akin to firing a real gun at a concert). The Leica was an integral part of the mystique. In those days (mid-1960's) SLR's were all the rage. Taking up the Leica was an ascetic choice: no light meter, no through-the-lens viewing. It was small and slender, and it was much quieter than the bulky SLR's with their prism and mirror arrangement. The SLR shutter sound had two parts, one when the mirror flipped out of the way and one when it slammed back down. The Leica, having only the sliding curtains of a focal plane shutter, made a barely audible sound. It was slim enough and the lens small enough that it was hardly noticeable, especially when carried flat against one's palm.

It was not long before I bought a Leica M-2 from a camera store in New Haven, CT, one of the last M-2's to be sold from brand new stock. It, and the M-3, were succeeded by the M-4, whose only real distinguishing feature was a canted take-up spindle. Leitz, the manufacturer, made the best lenses for 35 mm cameras so it was a step up from the Nikon to the M-2 with a 50mm and 35mm lenses. Leica's in those days were strictly rang-finder cameras, meaning you viewed the subject through an optical system separate from the camera's lens with frame markers to show the exact composition. The focusing system was superbly accurate and the image in the view finder was crisp and bright. I read that HC-B covered the bright metal body parts with black tape to reduce its visibility. I followed suit, cutting a mask from electric tape and fitting it over the view finder window. Carrying my M-2 I felt I had the perfect weapon of stealth.