brettworks

“I keep coming back to Cartier-Bresson and his paradoxical ethos of a technical prowess that cares not for technique.

‘People think far too much about technique,’ he says in one of his famous aphorisms, “and not enough about seeing.’”

“Consider what happens when you take a picture—I mean, what is going on inside you, the photographer, when you take it.”

“Because a photograph, when it is taken, represents a moment of intense and sudden love and insight for something visible in the world—for the world itself, or for life, or for one’s own self; a moment of connection that momentarily dissolves the barriers between the photographer and the things around him, outside him.”

“The happy-go-lucky photographer sails across the surface, enjoying what he wants to see and ignoring what he doesn’t. The anxious photographer dives down deep. He sees less, but what he does see he sees from all sides. Yet he remains in constant danger of drowning.”

“It is as if for that moment a hole is cut in your egoism and you can peer through at a much larger reality on the other side, a reality that you don’t normally notice or acknowledge while picking your way through traffic and talking to your companions in the car, and you are reminded that this much larger reality, which you have seen through to as if through a hole in a curtain or the lens of a camera, and in which the sun is always at work whether you are there to see it or not, and where trees bend in the wind, and people go about their business in small towns in Northern California, and butterflies flutter like so much flotsam and jetsam along roadsides in Arkansas, and loose gutters creak on the sides of houses, and mists come up in changes of temperature, and people die and people are born, and acorns fall from trees and squirrels eat them, and lizards in deserts scuttle over rocks; it is always there not waiting for you, not acknowledging you (it is so much bigger than you!), but ready at any time for you to notice and acknowledge it, and even, sometimes, when you least expect it, usually when you are alone and discover that you are free to do so, to enter into it for a little while with a camera.”

Benjamin Swett, The Picture Not Taken (2024)