living and loving the life of a photographer

Just a couple of weeks ago, somebody commented that they saw traces of Andrei Tarkovsky in my photographic style. Not knowing who Tarkovsky was (my ignorance), I wasn't sure what to make of it. I quickly put together a pair of images, for my own amusement more than anything else, made a mental note to myself, and left it at that.

As it happens, an exhibition in Paris is trying out a similar exercise. L'Image D'Apres at the Cinémathèque Française gets ten Magnum photographers to reveal how a director, film, or scene had influenced their work in some way. In typical art critic-speak, the curators write, “cinema creates the illusion of the real so that the spectator cannot doubt its verisimilitude; photography draws on the imagination to re-establish the truth of lived experience.” Of course.

What does it mean to be influenced by anyone or anything at all? Jim Casper notes in Lens Culture, “each pairing is unique, so there is no formula, no repetition. It re-affirms how wide-reaching influence can be and how many different forms it can take.” Check out the pdf dossier for an introduction to the photographers and their influences.

One of the photographers featured at L'Image D'Apres is Gueorgui Pinkhassov, whose greatest influence was from Tarkovskavian classics like Mirror and Stalker. The great director once told him, “If you see that someone works in your style, change your style.”

Equally inspired by Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra, Pinkhassov went on to capture slices of daily life in Moscow, an ordinarily impossible task at that time. He would shoot discretely from the hip, using the camera “like a revolver [that], just as in Russian roulette, hits its mark with sudden and unexpected precision.” The process reminded him more of fishing than shooting, said Pinkhassov, and felt at times that the photographic angels above begged him not to look through the lens and allow them to do their work in peace. [Source: Magnum Stories]

“My shutter finger lowered at my waist reacted to a sudden, strange appearance on the street; a gentleman in a bowler hat. He was leaving a store just as I was entering it. And a second later I saw him inside the store again. I couldn't understand it, thinking he had just left. But the photograph in the end solved the puzzle. I had caught two men, standing nose to nose — exact doubles of each other. Had the shutter been pressed an instant earlier or later, the photograph could never have had such an avant-garde composition.”
Photo: Men in the street, Moscow, 1979. © Gueorgui Pinkhassov/Magnum Photos

Minutes before I left for a holiday in Sri Lanka last December, I read Pinkhassov's autobiography. Completely bought into his approach to candid street photography, I tried to do a Pinkhassov while in the emerald isle, letting active composition take the back seat while reacting spontaneously to light, space, mood, and interactions. This, as opposed to staying rooted at one spot and waiting for something to happen.

While I'm not saying I advocate this ‘technique’, I think it worked wonders for me on that particular occasion. I was able to enjoy my holiday and let the angels do all the work!

See the rest of my Sri Lanka series.