Picture # 4/66
“Sometimes there’s no picture… no picture.” Thus spake Henri Cartier Bresson. And having spent quite a bit of time recently reviewing hundred of pictures posted on blogs and Facebook pages by street photographers, I see his point. Some pictures are just… well… pictures. If that. With little resonance, metaphorical heft.
No story.
I took this picture on a bus traveling through Rajasthan. A women engaged in what looked like a hopeless task. Sweeping an empty lane on a multi-lane highway as trucks and buses slowed down to pay the toll.
There would be no end to her sweeping, and the little she did would make no difference.
To me, it is a compelling instance of the infuriatingly complex nature of India. And I wished then, as I wish now, that I were a poet. I think then I might find words to describe the feeling I got when I saw her, and when I clicked the shutter.
But without the viewer knowing where she was, and what exactly she was doing, this picture is a ‘no picture’.
Just as on so many occasions I have a germ of a story, that is not a story. Until the second shoe drops. Until another element couples with the first germ to create something compelling and resonant.
Sometimes there’s no story.
Sometimes there’s no picture.
But we write it any. We take it anyway.
Because it was there. And so were we.