“DON’T THINK!”. THE IMMEDIACY OF THE PHOTOGRAPHIC ACT

The role of instinct on the street / Surrealist automation and street photography / A compliment from Henri Cartier-Bresson / Choosing the right lens / On ‘field photographs’ / Discussing surrealist pictures / Color and Black & White pairs / Dye-transfers

LB: In the introduction to the first edition of Wild Flowers, your first street photography book, you wrote, “I used photography to make the map of my mind visible to me. I find I am more interested in the stream of related images than in single monumental or successful photographs”.1 Photography speaks about our responses to the world or, if you like, the reflections of your impulses and desires in the world around you. The stream of visual consciousness allows you to recognize the echoes of your ambitions and your intentions. Photography serves you as a way to objectify your life and to see it more clearly. JM: Oh, I think it certainly serves, because once I stop time, and life, and I look at the picture, I recognize something about myself and my intentions, my desires, and my needs. And then, if a string of these images appears over time, I have the possibility of a new understanding of myself through these photographs. The first part of that statement really dealt with the accident of that book’s appearance. I already had two books: Cape Light and St. Louis and the Arch, both made with the view camera. Wild Flowers was an editing accident, because while I was editing something else, three interesting pictures showed up on the light table. Those pictures of flowers were each strong enough on their own, but they became even stronger together. These three pictures showed me that they weren’t what I was really making the picture about, so could I find other photographs that did that? Could I risk making a book about a cliché subject? What would that have said about me and my interests?

LB: Flowers were a device, like the arch was in St. Louis. You used them in order to develop your own discourse, which I believe is a discourse on emotional responses. With street photography, you don’t plan things precisely, as instinct comes before the aesthetic organization.

JM: Absolutely. Instinct is the divining rod that points to where the source is.

LB: Instinct and intuition guide you in a sort of ‘automatic seeing’. By that I mean the ability to be connected to your subconscious, and to be open to respond instantly to the impulses you receive. Our brain is able to process what we see before we can consciously elaborate it. If you are open and connected, you can learn how to read a scene automatically and anticipate an action or an accident. This skill characterizes all of your work, or at least the photographs made with the handheld camera.

JM: Every artist defines the challenge of their medium for themselves. It’s like Harold Bloom said in A Map of Misreading:2 you look at somebody else’s work, and are drawn to it, but misread elements in it, so that you can maintain your originality, or you add them to the dimension that you are creating for yourself. Robert Frank was the main influence for my generation, and our challenge was— How do you get around it? How do you use it? How not to be crippled by his influence? My notation was, “Well, you just misread the things in there that you respond to. You take what you need. That’s all. Don’t even worry about it”.

LB: I think street photography shares a degree of surrealist automatism at its core, and this is why you can use it to probe the unconscious mind (I am thinking about Walter Benjamin’s ‘optical unconscious’,3 and about Susan Sontag who wrote that photography is “the only art that is natively surreal”4). I always saw your photography, and its fundamental motivations, as strongly surrealist, precisely because of the role you attribute to your impulses on the street.

1 The first edition of the book was published by Little, Brown and Co. in 1983. The second edition was published by Damiani in 2021 and contains a new introduction by Maggie Barrett.

2 H. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, New York, Oxford University Press, 1975.

3 W. Benjamin, Little History of Photography, in Id., Selected Writings, II, Cambridge, MA (USA), Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 507530: 510-512.

4 S. Sontag, On Photography, London, Penguin, 2008 (orig. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p. 51.

JM: I would agree with that. I think I’ve always had a leaning in that direction. It’s as if things in the world have anima, and I recognize it, I get a little… hit! Sometimes the pictures that I make—even my early photographs—have that kind of surrealism in them. [see picture no. 9] I’ve always had a susceptibility to what could be called a surrealist instinct. Things seem strange, then you put a frame around them and their strangeness is now compressed in the frame; they’re bouncing off the edges, they’re relating only to each other, rather than having the full world. I don’t think they looked like surrealist paintings, but they had in them certain elements that made one feel the strange and almost awkward quality of the unexpected.

LB: That’s what I meant, the similarity is in the creative process. This is perhaps why you always carry a camera with you, you are always open to what life offers up to your eyes. It is the programmatic absence of a project, the absence of a strategy. The only strategy is: always be ready.

JM: I’ve said a number of times that a camera is a license to see. If you’re out walking the street and you have a camera on you, then it’s a reminder all the time. I feel the weight of it and I feel it against me, or it’s in my hand. It’s such a joy to see things on the street and respond to them. I don’t want to have the ache of missing something that maybe seems like nothing to somebody else, but to me, it plays its part in the mosaic of what is of interest to me throughout my time. It’s another little cell in me that opens up, as if I can know another thing about myself.

LB: Cézanne famously said, “If I think while I’m painting, everything is lost”. The immediacy of the creative act is invalidated by thought.

JM: That was one of the earliest awakenings I had with the camera, and it was a very practical thing. I looked at the dial on the camera and it said, 1/250 of a second, 1/500 of a second… who had time to think? Tony Ray-Jones and I learned together how to build our instincts. We were flying toward the moment that was revealing itself in front of us, and we were trying not to think. Both of us had been graphic designers, and graphic design is like a grid—you have to fit the elements into the page, according to spaces and proportions. It’s all very calculated. We were both trying to toss that off and be in the physicality of the moment. Often, we would yell at each other on the streets, “Don’t think! Just get there! Go there!”. It became a constant mantra that we would yell at each other, “Don’t think!”.

LB: What did you think of Tony Ray-Jones as a graphic designer?

JM: Tony was an excellent graphic designer. He could do magazine layouts that pulsed with energy and life. Both of us loved the German designer Willy Fleckhaus who designed the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in the sixties. I think he was the greatest art director in the world. A whole generation of designers came out of Willy Fleckhaus, also in America. Designing required graphic tendencies and sensibilities, while the street required freedom from boxing yourself in, or thinking about dividing the picture for the page, etc. Tony, much more than me, got caught in that trap and he was always whipping himself. He was trying to break away and he ultimately did, by leaving America and going back to England. He invented himself in England and really invented a way of seeing that was more Winogrand than Bresson, and yet very English.

LB: Evading the graphic design grid must have felt refreshing, but perhaps also a bit dispersive. You let go of something you knew well, in order to explore a territory that for you was completely new and open. JM: Part of the process of going forward, is turning away from something you know how to do well. If your mind is like your talons, you may have to pry a few talons loose so that the equilibrium between impulse and mind is more fluid. You will surprise yourself with flawed works, with beautiful flaws. It’s ‘ugly-beautiful’, we used to say. You’re willing to make a picture of a brutal looking thing, and thus transform it by recognizing it, into something beautiful photographically. But it’s still brutal. Garry Winogrand was really good at that, although he probably wouldn’t have said ugly-beautiful. He knew the hardness of certain human moments and he was unafraid to slip in and make the pictures that other people might say “Why are you doing that?”.

LB: Disregarding the commonly accepted rules is probably the first requisite in order to break new ground. You may then discover that is OK to have a tilted horizon, that you can make a frame with no strong subject in the middle, etc. Your generation pushed the boundaries of street photography, and what was then open field for you, it has now become established canon.

JM: The important thing was recognizing the critical necessity in your mind in order to make those kinds of pictures. It’s not like they just came. They came up because something had to be let go of. In order for the hot air balloon to rise, you have to throw a little ballast overboard so that you can lift off. You have to give up the thing that you know how to do well. You sometimes have to just give that up and say, “Okay I can do that. Now what? What’s the next thing that could be done? What other way is there to consider something?”. After a while, I felt myself bound up by Cartier-Bresson. I loved his work, and I still do, but I found that the values that he espoused were limiting. They were European and classical, and they had a formula to them, and that couldn’t exist on the streets of New York.

LB: You met Cartier-Bresson on a couple of occasions, didn’t you? I understand that you even received a rather flattering phone call from him once.

JM: We knew each other because we met on the street in 1963, and I saw him again in Paris in 1966. When I went there, I was carrying all one hundred of Garry’s animal pictures trying to get them published for him. Garry always had somebody else doing his work for him. He couldn’t do it himself for some reason. Tod Papageorge did it, John Szarkowski did it, Leo Rubinfein did it, Tom Roma… everybody has done things for Garry. I was the first: I carried a hundred pictures of The Animals, 11x14” prints, to Paris and I showed them to Robert Delpire. While I was there, he said, “Let me call a friend”, and he called Cartier-Bresson who was a few blocks away, and he showed up an hour later and we looked at the pictures. He didn’t like them at all! He said, “No discipline, they’re all over the place”, etc. Ten years later, or maybe less, I’m in my apartment in New York. I’m actually