Photography and Cinema

city. When Christopher Isherwood set out to describe daily life in Berlin

before the Second World War, he wrote:

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not

thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and

the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will

have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.^1

Like many writers and artists of that period, Isherwood adopted a

camera-eye, or camera-I, as the ideal ego for urban living. Responding to

the visual stimulation of the city, it neatly collapsed being and seeing into

a single condition. But was this metaphor photographic or cinematic?

Isherwood keeps it open. ‘Printed, fixed’ suggests the still image. A ‘shutter

open’ at length might imply something more like a running film camera,

or perhaps a long exposure capturing an abstract trace of movement

over time. Such ambiguity was a symptom of the temporal challenges of

modern life. Was the metropolis to be experienced in fits and starts, or in

its continuous unfolding? The photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson also

spoke of the camera as an extension of his eye. Here he recalls developing

in the 1930 s what came to be known as his credo, the ‘decisive moment’:

I prowled the street all day, feeling very strung up and ready to

pounce, determined to ‘trap’ life, to preserve it in the act of living.

Above all I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one

single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of

unrolling itself before my eyes.^2

‘Trapping’ and ‘seizing’ belong to photography’s quick snap. The

‘whole essence’ suggests a longer situation condensed into one frame.

And ‘unrolling before my eyes’ hints at an observer not quiteinthe world

but removed, as if watching it on a screen. In the opening paragraph of

his bookImages à la Sauvette(translated asThe Decisive Moment, 1952 ),

Cartier-Bresson tells of ‘bursting’ into photography as a boy, taking snap-

shots with a Box Brownie. The second begins: ‘Then there were the movies.

From the great films I learned to look and to see’.^3 In the third he describes 25