|
Cartier-Bresson's Photo of a Leaping Man by Amy Dienes
I love Eli Siegel and Aesthetic Realism for teaching me a way of seeing the world and photography that revolutionized my life. In this great principle Eli Siegel defines beauty and shows what every person is looking for in life: All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.Aesthetic Realism says that the beginning opposites every person is trying to put together are self and world, and today I will be speaking about what we can learn about how to see the true relation of ourselves to the world from this famous photograph by the French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson.
It was taken in 1932, behind the Gare St. Lazare, a large railroad station in Paris. We see in the foreground the silhouette of one man in the midst of a leap. He is one particular man in a bowler hat, taking a chance, and yet how richly and subtly Cartier-Bresson makes us see the relation of this man to the world around him. As I have studied this photograph, I have come to feel that it is one of the great photographs of the world because of the way Cartier-Bresson shows, through lines, shapes, forms and through light and dark, that the self is in an unlimited relation to reality and it is relation which gives the self meaning and grandeur. In his book, Self and World, Mr. Siegel describes magnificently the feeling of the artist as he works: Art is internal and external. The repose a person feels in aesthetic creation comes from his, for the time, feeling he is what he is and also what he is not. Ego and otherness don't fight for the while. The artist feels he has reached form in the deepest places of his personality, because things outside himself have been seen courageously, truly, respectfully by him.This mighty aesthetic principle explains, I believe, the importance of Cartier-Bresson as photographer and it also has particular relevance, as I'll show, to the photograph I am speaking of. I. The Self Is Individual and Related In an Aesthetic Realism class I was honored to attend in 1976, Eli Siegel spoke to me about the way I went after my individuality falsely through separating myself from other people and things. With tremendous kindness he asked me these critical questions: Eli Siegel: Do you want to go for the self including and being in relation or the self being all by oneself? The self happens to be the least selfish thing on earth, also the most selfish. You want to think there is a certain value by being apart from other things that cannot be replaced. What kind of self do you want to have?....Every person is asking all the time: What kind of self do I want to have? What do I take self to mean?These questions educated me and they continue to change me. And I was excited as I saw how Cartier-Bresson's photograph comments on Mr. Siegel's question: "Do you want to go for the self including and being in relation or the self being all by itself?" The man in this photograph is both what Mr. Siegel called "the self being all by oneself," and "the self including and being in relation!" His being in motion, accented by the diagonals of his legs, standing out in black against the white behind them, makes us feel his difference from other things in the picture--"the self being all by oneself." It is he alone who is making that leap. And yet, at the same time, how he is in relation! First we see his image is repeated in the water upside down. There is such drama as the point of his heel almost, but not quite, touches the glassy, as yet, undisturbed, surface of the water. Then we see the V shape in his striding legs is repeated not only in his reflection, but in the rooftops in the back-ground above. And then all at once we see on the far wall there are posters with two silhouetted figures leaping, as the man is, but in the opposite direction. This is the most amazing relation in this photograph, and it was captured by Cartier-Bresson not only by chance. In the book, Dialogue with Photography, Henri Cartier-Bresson said this: To take photographs means to recognize--simultaneously and within a fraction of a second--both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis.Implied here is something Aesthetic Realism taught me, that it is the relation between things, what Cartier-Bresson calls "the rigorous organization of....forms" that gives a fact meaning. This, I am so grateful to have learned, is just as true when the fact is a fact about our very own selves. Before I began to study Aesthetic Realism, though I worked closely with people in my work as a nurse, I did not see myself as like other people. Outwardly I was polite and agreeable, although inwardly I felt different from other people and bitterly triumphant because I felt that other people didn't see my value. The time I thought I was most myself was when I was by myself. I liked my work but when I went home, very often with take out food, I would sit down in front of the TV and feel now is the time for me. The rest of the world would become dull and unimportant. But I often felt lonely and empty. Increasingly I felt things didn't mean anything to me and I worried about going through life feeling that. Aesthetic Realism changed this feeling in me forever. I learned that at every moment I had a choice between liking the world and having contempt for the world. It was my desire to have contempt that made me feel my individuality came from how I was different from the rest of humanity. Aesthetic Realism defines contempt as the "...disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world." I can still remember vividly the relief I felt when I learned I was, as every person is, two people: I was selfish, and I wanted to care for other things. This made me, I saw, like every other person on the face of the earth. I was trying to put opposites together, and I could learn from art how to be the person I wanted to be. Cartier-Bresson, in this photograph,
shows us the opposites of self and reality not fighting, but beautifully
getting along and helping each other.
II. We Are Horizontal and Vertical In Self and World, Eli Siegel has these beautiful and scientific sentences about directions in the self: The vertical line is a symbol to the unconscious of the self alone; the horizontal, of the self going out....The down and up motion of a line is like the ego given to nothing but itself. The horizontal line represents the ego going out as an offset to verticality.In this photograph there is an interplay of horizontals and verticals making for solid structure within disorder and mistiness. The format of Cartier-Bresson's photograph is vertical but is divided into horizontal bands of alternating light and dark. The poles of the fence are regularly vertical but, as you look at the fence, it becomes horizontal as it travels across the photograph. There are other horizontal lines, the debris, the ladder, the reflection of the fence, the Brailowsky bill-boards. The way horizontal and vertical join most dramatically is in the leaping figure who is a vertical gracefully changing into a horizontal in his leap. How kind of Cartier-Bresson to show with such grace and style that "the self alone" and "the self going out" can be seen as one and the same of a Paris afternoon. I am sure that this is what made me love this photograph at first sight. Because the man is a black shape without detail, he is also abstract. He seems to represent mankind. You get the feeling of a conservative businessman, in suit and bowler hat, and here he is, leaping into the unknown. He is like all of us, conservative and bold, ordinary and mysterious. There is a man at the fence who is also a dark shape. He looks more hidden, and he is indeed, just a vertical without the diagonals of the moving figure. He seems to represent the other side of self, "the self alone," rather than "the self going out," yet as he stands there between the leaping man and the leaping dancer in the posters, connected to them by the horizontal fence, we feel the two aspects of self once again completing each other. There is a great deal more that could be said about the beauty of this photograph and the way it shows the oneness of opposites in reality. Cartier-Bresson shows a world we can honestly like, and the man in his leap, in his energy, in his abandon to the splash that is to come, this man represents the spontaneous letting-go I want to have, the going out to the world with welcoming generosity. This photograph shows resoundingly, joyfully, that the self is more through relation. In his great lecture, Aesthetic Realism as Beauty: Photography, Eli Siegel said: Photography itself we should know, and the great work in it, because it helps us to know what we want.The Aesthetic Realism of Eli Siegel is revolutionary education in the way it explains the self through art, and art through a true seeing of self and world. I am grateful that through this education I am learning, and all people can learn, what kind of selves we want to have. © 2000-2005 by Amy Dienes This talk is one in the series: The Aesthetic Realism of Eli Siegel Shows How Art Answers the Questions of Your Life, presented at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, 141 Greene Street, off West Houston in SoHo. This talk has appeared as an article in The Journal of the Print World and The Phillipine Post |
