Cartier-Bresson, the mystical and Holistic Education

I continue to see Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photography, and the aesthetic of photography that he and his work presents, as vital to our understanding of the spiritual dimension of Holistic Education. The novelist John Banville’s review of The Henri Cartier-Bresson Scrapbook (Thames & Hudson) brought me back to this consideration.

Cartier-Bresson took, or evolved, as his keynote for his kind of photography the idea of the decisive moment. This he took from the 17th-century Cardinal de Retz: “Il n’y a rien dans ce monde qui n’ait un moment decisif” (”There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment”).

Cartier-Bresson applied this to his photographic style. He said:

“To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms that give that event its proper expression.”

Cartier-Bresson also said to the Washington Post in 1957;

“Photography is not like painting,” “There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative,” he said. “Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.”

There are many themes that bridge his kind of photographic understanding and the spiritual dimension of Holistic Education. Some of these are; time and timelessness,decisive moments, wholeleness and particularity, ’satori’ and the moment of recognition and insight, flow, the natural world and art as human intervention – and no doubt many more such themes.

Of course this connecting of his work with such a mystical view as I am suggesting would not have pleased Cartier-Bresson.

‘I don’t believe in God,’ he once said ….. ‘but I do believe in pi,’ and then wrote down some numbers on a table napkin which I recognised as the formula for the golden section, the mathematical rule of aesthetic balance which has been used by artists since antiquity.

It is this adherence to the primacy of form, says Banville, that gives his work its aura of passionate calm. He believed that geometry is the necessary foundation of all art.

For some of us however the mathematical rule of aesthetic balance and the Divine are not mutually exclusive. Rather the geometry is a grid through we choose to see and frame the unknown and unknowable. Such an aesthetic structure is simply a contextualizing of the ineffable that eases the pain of impossibility. Such an aesthetic can start in geometry but it doesn’t have to end there. The goemetry is the shape of the finger that points toward the Whole.

Sources

Daily Telegraph review by John Banville

See also Wiki entry on Cartier-Bresson

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