Readers

There was recently a feature on Italian photographer Ferdinando Scianna in the Guardian, an interview in which he explains how he's finally given up photography at age 79, and claims that, out of over a million photographs he has taken, only fifty are "good". I know exactly how he feels, even though I've still got a decade to go by that measure. To be honest, it took me a little while to realise who Scianna is, but the penny finally dropped that one of his fashion shots from the 1980s has long lived in my file of Good Stuff downloaded from the Web, in the form of a postcard to promote a series of portfolios by Magnum photographers produced by American paper manufacturer Domtar in order to show off their photographic paper Bravo.

I love that picture. It is both sexy and self-parodying: both the model and the boy are self-consciously "doing" a fashion shoot. Here is another version, in a slightly different crop and contrast:

Marpessa, Caltagirone, 1987

I must admit I originally took the skinny girl in black as some local beauty, doing model-style moves for the boy pretending to be a photographer, perhaps her little brother; half mocking, half playing up to the real photographer behind the real camera. In fact, it turns out the image is from Dolce & Gabbana’s 1987 ad campaign, featuring model Marpessa Henni, a.k.a. "the Catwalk Contessa", but no less brilliant for that. In photography, appearances are everything.

Talking of which, on Scianna's Magnum profile page (well worth a visit) there is a wonderful quote:

A photograph is not created by a photographer. What they do is just to open a little window and capture it. The world then writes itself on the film. The act of the photographer is closer to reading than it is to writing. They are the readers of the world.

Of course, some readers of the world are better than others, and the best readers show those of us who care about such things how to read with closer attention.

Seen from an Anglo-American perspective, it can sometimes seem that European photography constitutes a separate genre of activity, despite the pervasive influence of major names like Henri Cartier-Bresson or Josef Koudelka. So many outstanding photographers are virtually unknown to the English-speaking world; primarily, I suppose, because of the one-way valve of language sitting between the Anglosphere and the rest of the world. Speak, write, and publish in English, and you will become an honorary Anglo; stick with your native tongue, and remain "obscure". [1]

Of course, translation doesn't guarantee comprehension. A while ago I had a little fun with the bizarre translation of the foreword to the English-language version of Luigi Ghirri's oustanding book Kodachrome, which led me to take a closer look at what that hilarious Anglicized verbiage might really mean (in my post Not So Fast, English). But consider that byword of photography, the decisive moment. As is well known, that expression – and the whole associated philosophical package of "street" photography – comes from Henri Cartier-Bresson's seminal book, The Decisive Moment, with its lovely cover design by Henri Matisse, no less, and its dozens of truly "iconic" images. But: that is the English title of the book. In its original French, the book is called Images à la Sauvette, which is very far from meaning "the decisive moment".

So,what does "images à la sauvette" mean? Well, it is sometimes translated as "images on the fly" or "on the run", but that doesn't really do it justice. Basically, sauvette is an adverb meaning "hastily". My schoolboy French is far from current or idiomatic, but it seems that to do anything à la sauvette has distinctly negative overtones. For example, vendre à la sauvette (to sell stuff in the 'asty manner) is what unlicensed street traders do, and generally speaking the expression seems to be used to indicate undue haste, such as rushing something like legislation through without proper scrutiny or on the sly: see the examples given in that useful linguistic resource Linguee. So, I humbly propose that any future English edition of HC-B's masterpiece should be entitled Grab Shots. [2]

1. Not to mention the rest of the world. Japan in particular seems to be a bottomless well of creative photographers. My problem (and I concede this may be ethnocentric to the point of linguistic racism) is that I can't remember most of their names, seemingly assembled at random from the same small handful of parts. I'm never sure whether all linguistic-cultural groups have the same difficulty with each other's names, or whether this is peculiar to the Anglophone world.

2. I'm being more than a little facetious, obviously. The French equivalent of "decisive moment" (le moment décisif) does occur in the book: it's the opening quote of the preface, although – bizarrely – extracted from the memoirs of Cardinal de Retz (who?), published in 1717: «Il n’y a rien dans le monde qui n’ait son moment décisif» ("There is nothing in this world that not have its decisive moment"). Quite what Retz and/or HC-B actually meant by "the decisive moment" is, not unlike Roland Barthes' elusive concept of "punctum", much misunderstood and a matter for debate. Personally, as my parents tended to complain when I was a kid, I just like to look at the pictures in a book.