About a Photograph: Drawing Bresson
Today, I tried to draw a photograph taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson and only after writing this piece did I understand why out of several I chose this particular one. Obviously, this picture spoke to me because it has a story. Anyone can tell me that. But what is the story?
The caption below the photo said — “A group of children play amongst the rubble. Seville, Spain. 1933.” There is another photograph that Bresson had taken in the same place. Unlike this one, its composition is more symmetrical in that the hole in the wall centrally frames the boys. This, however, is the one that I feel captures the optimal ‘decisive moment’.
At first glance, there is a bunch of the boys and they’re laughing. The innocence of childhood and its unencumbered joys form the basis of this picture. But it’s more nuanced than that. The first boy I drew was the one with the crutches right in front because he caught my attention right away. When I had looked at the picture before I thought he had been running away, pursued by others while playing a game, perhaps.
Then I went on the draw the boy directly behind him with an arm outstretched (pic 1.1). Seems the boy with crutches has something the boy behind him wants — I couldn’t see any visual evidence of what that might be. But here is the first strand of the story. Some years ago, I remember a professor had told us — the smallest social unit is not one person, it’s two people. Until the point that we had just that one boy, we had a fact. Now, with another boy behind him, caught mid-action at the ‘decisive moment’ with his outstretched arm in a motion blur and a clump of his hair flying in the wind, we have conflict — we have a social relationship, in simpler words, we have a story.
Next, I went on to the boy in white behind the perturbed child, the one who is holding him back (pic 1.2). So, they’re friends then — the boy in crutches and the boy in white. This is the second relationship — of friendship and allies. Perhaps because of the fact that these four boys are in much closer proximity to each other than the rest, I went on the draw the boy standing closest to the wall on frame left who is looking away (pic 1.2). As I began drawing him, I noticed first the cap — here I didn’t have hair to frame the face, I had a cap. As I drew the rest of him, I noticed a discernible collar and then interestingly — socks! Who else in the photograph has socks? The boy being held back, of course! But this is wonderful — there are two people who resemble each other in attire but theirs isn’t an equation of friendship. In fact, the boy with the cap is looking away.
For a moment it felt like I had a complete narrative in these four boys. But then I noticed the one with the cap more closely. He was looking away but also at someone else and that opened up the picture a little bit more to me.
I have always loved how gazes direct attention in photographs; always so much more engaging once you’ve found them, than physical lines. If you follow the gaze of the boy in the cap, you’ll see the boy he is looking at is wearing an armband and running at full speed towards the action unfolding ahead of him with a jaw-wide smile (pic 1.3). Right next to him is a boy whose head is raised with a mouthful of laughter and it’s easy to gauge the magnitude of joy he feels at this moment by the way his hands fervently clutch his stomach (pic 1.3).
And this laughing boy is being looked at by a boy to the right carrying a basket but unlike anyone else in this photograph he looks on with a serious expression (pic 1.4). Perhaps it’s not all fun and games for him or he just hasn’t caught up with the joke yet. Perhaps he will smile once the boy running towards the four in the foreground does whatever mischief his look portends. And except for the one boy on frame right who looks straight at Bresson’s Leica with an ‘I see what you’re doing there’ kind of expression (pic 1.5), no one else seems to know or care that he’s there.
What is this moment? We’ve all known it. We might even have a picture of it. Or perhaps only a mental negative stacked away somewhere. At different points in our life, we have been one or all of these boys — the teaser, the teased, the friend who stands aside, the complicit spectators, the sneaky catalysts who always join in at just the right minute to add that extra bit of punch the prank was lacking.
I don’t recall ever being captured in such a moment in my life. The older I grew the more I was insistent nobody take a picture of me. So, I don’t have too many candid photographs of myself. But when I see this photograph, when I sit down to unravel the strands that run through it, I can see who I might be, I can place few of my known faces here in this motley group of characters. I would love to be the boy who is the catalyst, but I would probably save that for another friend. Realistically, I think I would be either the one bursting into peals of laughter or the boy turning the wheel. But truthfully, I would be happy to be anyone of them in this photograph with a smile of heartfelt abandon.
Now I felt I really had a grasp on the photograph. But how horribly mistaken I was. I should have written about this before but it slipped from my mind because it hadn’t occur to be particularly important in the beginning. If you found it before I did, then kudos to you. But let me get there anyway.
The wall. I began my drawing with it because I hadn’t delineated any borders to the page. I just assumed this would be the physical boundary of the characters — beyond this jagged line they would not step across. So, I took great pains to exactly match the way in which the wall had been broken, every line and edge. At the end of the sketch, I looked again to see if I had missed anything. I had. Two things. I was in the process of turning the broken wall into a three-dimensional structure after sketching all of the boys when I noticed on the right side of the frame, the wall is dotted with tiny holes (pic 1.6).
There are around 13 of these. Considering that the children are playing in the midst of what definitely looks like ruins, could they be bullet holes? I rewinded to the first time I had seen this photograph sitting in class, projected on a huge screen. I had seen it again on my phone, again on my laptop. I had been staring at it intently for the last thirty minutes trying to untangle of the tassel of relationships between the characters in it. I had been so caught up in the story, in how much I liked the picture and the moment, I hadn’t taken the time to look at what framed it. I had seen it perhaps, but I hadn’t looked. I was complacent with not understanding. I had thought it was a beautiful picture of kids playing in the rubble in 1933 in Spain. I hadn’t looked at the holes in the wall. The year was a four-digit number to me. I was complicit in my privilege of never having played in rubble and never having lived in the heart of political unrest. These kids don’t look much other than 11, even the oldest of them. The next three to six years, will determine if they survive their teenage years or not.
There are two ways of depicting caveats to violence, I suppose. You can paint the Guernica — show violence for what it is, blood shed and loss of livelihood and unprecedented casualties of innocents. Or you can capture one pristine moment of untainted happiness of children caught mid-laughter and frame it within a wall earmarked with bullet holes and caption it — “A group of children play amongst the rubble. Seville, Spain. 1933.” Three years before the Spanish Civil War.
