Three weeks before his death in 1978, in an interview with Hector Biancotti and Jean-Paul Enthoven, the French sociologist Roger Caillois recalled these words of Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu. "I believe that people have always been afraid of writing. When it was invented in China, Lao Tzu was filled with fear; and how he could not be in the face of this strange magic which enabled men to speak in the void, as it were, and above all to conjure up things which perhaps do not exist? For the world of philosophy, reality serves the same function as the gold standard in the world of finance. Abandon it, and inflation looms... Lao had the good sense to protest, 'I shall make them go back to knotted string.' At that time, the Chinese expressed their thoughts by tying knots in this way. Each knot corresponded to an idea. This was their way of demonstrating a profound respect for the real world." Like Lao Tzu, Henri Cartier Bresson makes us go back to knotted string. His photographs celebrate the things of the real world, including - ephemeral and frigile, neither dominant nor pre-eminent - human beings : the inhabitants of the great stage that is the world, who would be only too happy to believe themselves the creqtors of it if they were not summoned back, gently but firmly, to a degree of modesty. This is the essence of landscapes : they are echoes of the never-ending dialogue between being and doing; between people, who want to leave their mark, and the earth, which offers them only its topmost layer of skin. Erik Orsenna
|
Henri Cartier-Bresson - Landscape Townscape
|
|
|
Preface by Erik Orsenna, postface by Gérard Macé. 106 black & white photographs 62 € ISBN : 285-107206-4 |
