The Photographer's Dilemma - Part One

I spent this morning treating myself.  With a fresh pot of coffee I watched a film about Henri Cartier-Bresson.   To me he’s the greatest photographer to have lived; the Picasso or Leonardo or Michelangelo of photography.  The more of his photographs I look at, the more I see and the more his brilliance rises to the surface.  He is the one photographer that I can return to again and again and again and always find new things in his images.  He is acclaimed for establishing the concept of the “decisive moment,” but if you think of him from just that perspective you are doing yourself an injustice.  You should go on the internet right now and look at some of his images.

The film is titled The Inspired Eye, and includes him and others talking about his work - both the images and the way he worked.  In the film, the photographer Josef Koudelka (another one worth checking out) mentions that the hardest thing for a photographer is to look at his or her own work impassionately - to forget everything that went into making the image and to look at that image for what it is, standing on its own.  That is the photographer’s dilemma, especially when you don’t have a great editor to point the way for you.  Koudelka mentioned the editor at Magnum Photography that helped Cartier-Bresson and himself so much.  I once read a quote by that editor, who said that Cartier-Bresson’s greatness did not come at the time he pressed the camera shutter, it came when he looked at a contact print of 36 images and said, “Print THAT one!”

Time and time again in the film, and in his writings, he talks about geometry and composition.  He was not a photographer, he was an artist - a drawer to be precise - and returned to drawing at the end of his life.  He said, "Only a fraction of the camera's possibilities interests me - the marvelous mixture of emotion and geometry together in a single instant."  He talks about how the eye, mind and heart must be aligned for a great photograph to happen.  And that once the camera comes to the eye, one intuitively frames the best composition, incorporating all of the elements of within the frame, and then you wait for a particular moment to capture, all the while knowing that there may be so much going on in the frame that is outside of your control.  For that reason, his images are almost always printed full frame, because that is what he worked with and he believed was part of the image he decided to make.

All of that is background, but led me to revisit one of the images I’ve posted from my trip to Voinjama.  To look at the full frame to see if it is indeed more than the cropped image that I posted.  This is what you saw:

And this is what I photographed:

So I ask you - Which is the better image?

Much has been made in this age of photoshop about honesty in photography.  I hate to shatter anyone’s bubble, but photography has always been, and necessarily is, an abstraction of the world.  I don’t feel that one of the above images is more “honest” than the other.  I did nothing in Adobe Lightroom that I would not have done in the darkroom.  The cropped image perhaps is a better image for telling a story - which is why I cropped it.  And at the time of the photograph I wondered whether I should not take it because, if I’d had a telephoto or a zoom lens, I would have used it to get more of her and less of the road.  Thus the cropped image is closer to what I wanted to take at the time.  But the image immediately above is the one I “took” because it was the camera I had, and everything in the frame is the result of my conscious and unconscious mind at work to construct the best image I could with the tool I had in my hand.

If one wishes to speak about honesty, these photographs are the result of the pure honest interaction between a young girl and me.  A girl who wanted her photograph taken and me who consented to take it.  Usually it’s the other way around.  

So I ask you again - Which is the better image?