On the counterintuitive in everyday life (5)

5. An example from photography

Cartier-Bresson’s famous Derrière la gare Saint-Lazare and the “decisive moment”

French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’s most famous picture Derrière la gare Saint-Lazare, which he took in Paris in 1932, may well be one of those counterintuitive pieces of art that I mentioned in the previous post. In this photograph, we can see a man jumping from a kind of small footbridge, which looks like a ladder and which is laid on a flooded ground. The photograph has been taken at the precise moment when the man is going to land, his right foot being literally a few centimeters from the small pool. Although cropped (which is very rare in Cartier-Bresson’s work), this is an astonishing picture, and one of the most celebrated photographs in history.

This picture also perfectly illustrates Cartier-Bresson’s concept of a successful photograph, namely that it must be taken at the “decisive moment”. What does he mean by that? According to Cartier-Bresson, “to photograph is to recognize, in a single moment and in a fraction of a second, a fact and the rigorous organization of the forms visually perceived which express and signify this fact.” (translated from French; excerpted from Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, 1982, Centre National de la Photographie, coll. Photo Poche no 2, p. 8). From this point of view, there then would be some precise moments, which would be perfectly representative of a particular thing (a phenomenon, an act, an event, a situation, and so on), and which the photographer has to catch from the vanishing reality. It also seems to me that one would not betray Cartier-Bresson’s thought by saying that in these precise moments, things appears to be more vivid, and more “real” (as if the photographer would have been able to catch them in their full representativeness and reality). I will however defend an opposite view in order to explain the success of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs, arguing that on the contrary they represent things in their “unreality”, i.e. in their sides which are not perceptible in reality, and that this is precisely what makes them so successful.

Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moments” are not perceptible in reality

We never see in the reality of perception the “decisive moments” that Cartier-Bresson has photographed, and it is very probable that he himself never saw them either. Our perceptive equipment, in this case our eye, is not built like a camera, and it does not permit us to fix a particular moment on our retina. If we had seen, in the reality of our perception, this man jumping behind the Saint-Lazare station who Cartier-Bresson photographed, we would have seen only the jump in its movement, and not that “decisive moment” where the jumper, at a few centimeters from the ground, is going to land (or at least not at the time, because it is true that such “fixed” moments can be remembered after). One can conclude from that that the “decisive moments” photographed by Cartier-Bresson are far from our perception of things in reality, and that they are not at all representative of nor more “faithful” to the “essence” of things. These decisive photographed moments are on the contrary counterintuitive, because they show us things in an unusual way, which we cannot experience directly in reality. And this is maybe exactly why they are so attention-grabbing, as I will develop it now. 

Cartier-Bresson’s Derrière la gare Saint-Lazare from a counterintuitive point of view

Just like Boyer’s religious and supernatural concepts, it is probable that Cartier-Bresson’s masterpiece follows a recipe which is cognitively very efficient:

1. it represents a common scene which is easily recognizable to observers;
2. it violates this usual scene in introducing in it a counterintuitive element;
3. it preserves all the other usual elements of such a common scene.

1. Derrière la gare Saint-Lazare depicts a scene from everyday life, in a common place. It has been taken behind a railway station, in a kind of banal piece of waste ground. The jumper himself seems to be an ordinary man, maybe a worker or a railwayman. In addition, most of the elements of this scene are easily recognizable. One can see with no effort the roofs of some buildings, a metallic fence, a figure of another person in the background, and so on. This is very important from the cognitive point of view, because as we have seen  in the second post of this weblog, activation of things already acquired in our minds permit us to produce many inferences and intuitive expectations about these things (e.g. how they move, which is the decisive point in this example).

2. In such a common scene, however, is that man jumping or, more precisely, is this jumper “fixed” at the precise moment when he is going to land, and this constitutes the counterintuitive element. Why is this the case? Our usual concept of a person who is jumping implies motion, because it is always in motion that we perceive actual persons jumping. This also means that we expect that all jumps will always be in motion. In these conditions, Derrière la gare Saint-Lazare’s jumper violates our expectation about our jump concept, and this because it is fixed in Cartier Bresson’s photograph. Just like Boyer’s religious concepts, Cartier Bresson’s photographs of “decisive moments” are counterintuitive and attention-grabbing, because after having activated in our minds some acquired concepts with all the expectations that we have about these concepts (a person who is jumping is in motion), they violate them in presenting us things in a way which is not perceptible in reality (a jump which is not in motion).

3. Despite this counterintuitive, or more precisely “counterperceptive”, element, Cartier-Bresson’s photograph preserves all the other elements of the represented scene. It is probable that if he had introduced in his picture another counterintuitive element, such as a heavy out of focus effect on the jumper, we would not be so amazed, just because we would not be able to recognize a person who is jumping; being impossible for us to produce precise inferences about an object which is not identified, we then could not be contradicted in our (nonexistent) expectations.