Two llttle known episodes about Cartier Bresson

Cartier-Bresson has probably been the most influential photographer of the 20th Century, that is how the French and I see it anyway. :)

So there was recently this huge exhbition in Paris called 'Le Siècle de Cartier-Bresson'. And a documentary of the same name was released by ArteTV, which I encourage you to get here (in French on uTube. Poor definition though). 

Thirty years earlier, int the 1970s a seminal interview in English was taken by the NYTimes: 'There are no maybes'. It is perhaps even more interesting, because HCB, who had learned his English in Cambridge, probably gave a more succint but forceful version of his life events.

 I remember how he tells his encounter with Ghandi. At some point Ghandi pointed at HCB's book, at picture of a man looking at a corbillard, and adorned coach carrying a dead man. 'Why? What is it?' Ghandi asks.

 And HCB says: it is a picture ot the famous French writer Paul Claudel. 'He was a Catholic you know, so he was meditating about death.' Henri says.

And so Ghandi shakes his head, and says: 'Ah, Death! Death, Death…' A day later he was assassinated.

 Here you will find his portrait by HCB and below the announcement to the crowds by Nehru that the Mathama has died. Not a great picture, but a v. moving one. Just a day had lapsed between the two!  Just the same, from portraitist HCB had become his reporter self again.

Nehru announces Ghandi's death

It has been argued by Roland Barthes that photography  is intrinsically, intimately connected with death. He makes the example in his 'Camera Lucida', of corpses recomposed by their families to look if they were alive. Those were the first commemorative photos, and among the first ever in the 1850s. Photography here is about embalming the dead, as if they were mummies.

In his photobook 'the Decisive Instant,' that has just been reprinted in NY with its original cover by Matisse, HCB goes on that a photog must take a shot just before the actor vanishes and the moment is lost irretrievably.

Barthes goes on making his same point: a picture might be interesting by what it shows about the surroundings, and that is the Studium.

 But without the Punctus, the meaningul intstant, a picture will be just that… Interesting. How many millions of pictures do we know in social sites that are just that?

That is because every instant of life is intimately connected with ideath. This concept of the instant nature of reality is the same of buddhism.

Therefore it is no surprise, that HCB quoted the Zen and the Art of Archery by Herrigel. One can take one shot only and it must be the perfect one. 

And yet he goes on musing, for all your considerations about the scene, the geometry of it, the symmetry, and the way its characters relate to each other, you must let your intuition play in that single instant that is a shot. Never intellectualize. A  photo lives and dies in a single heatbeat.

Fom the French interview Henri appears as an incredibly bookish character, like a true French Intellectuel. Son of a textile industrialist he went to Lycée Fénélon, the best of the best. See Wikipedia about him.  He was introduced to painting by his uncle, but then had courses by well known Lhote, an academic painter, but dropped him when he found him too stuffy.

He describes how he followed the Surrealist first meetings at cafe' La Coupole  to the point that he considered himself a Surrealist. It is a precious information because it allows to see his pictures under a different light, notably those strange compositions of people emerging from holes.

Children in Toledo, 1944, Spain

 It also explains his stance against colonization, which the Surrealists abhorred. 'In Africa I have seen the 'Heart of Darkness' he famously said, about his first trip. And hence his stance in India and in China:

A Eunuch, by the Forbidden City, China

But then came a day when his business partner at Magnum, Robert Capa,  told him: 'you know, Henri you can't go on telling people that you are a surrealist photog. You will get no assignments. People will always confine you like a plant in a hothouse. You must introduce yourself as a photoreporter only.'

That explains also many of HCB later understatements, although there is no doubt that he was a great artist. Remember also that Capa had had his scrapes with death : take his picture of the Republican soldier  hit by a bullet? Isn't it another decisive instant, if it were one? Again Barthes' Punctus.

Now the second episode. Before founding Magnum with Capa, HCB had been a prisoner in a Nazi camp, which almost killed him by exhaustion. He had evaded and then joined the Resistance as a photographer. Those were perhaps his true beginnings.

Some years later HCB had to take portraits of a famous poet, Ezra Pound. I have an immense respect for him as one of the few who was ever able to decode Guido Cavalcanti's 'Donna me prega' canzone, a 1350s poem with all the rituals of Courteous Love. 

 'Donna me prega' is one of the most complicated pieces in the Italian language. (Here's an essay about it from Cambridge). A ray of Light carries the image of the beloved through the pupils of the eyes, and from there hits the intellect and the heart. It's a photo theory, from the 1200s.

Pound translated Cavalcanti in Old English in his 'Essays', but first he had to explain his choices and unlock all the secrets of  the Medieval canzone, he an American, and a self taught at that! His own Italian Cantos are a thing of beauty.

Now HCB goes to the appointment with the poet and discovers a wreck of a man. Pound had been a prisoner of war too, but of a different kind. American soldiers, his fellow citizens, had put him in a cage for months as a wild animal, for his dealings with Mussolini, which he admired. Hence he had become a countryless man.

Now about their meeting, opinions diverge. Martine CB mentions that the interview lasted half an hour and HCB took only a few pictures, HCB recalls he spent two hours with Ezra, and he took only 6 pictures.

Both concur that nobody spoke a word. So you must imagine the scene: two prisoners of war meet, but their different sides prevent any comradesship, so they don't speak a word.

Imagine also Pound, a great poet, a very cultivated man, who according to HCB, seemed to have come to a point where by his silence he showed he despised everybody and everything.

Ezra Pound, one year before his death

HCB must have registered this, and so made use ot the silence to jot  the crevices of a destroyed man. One year later EP was dead. So instead we have those precious pictures of a great man.

 Note that in portraits too there are decisive instants. Note that HCB  concern for geometry and symmetry is completely absent. A human face is death delayed.

And now to lighten up. The booklet 'The Decisive Moment' was never called that! In the French original edition, it was called: 'Images a' la Sauvette' (stolen images), and that puts HCB in a long tradition of Paris strollers, flaneurs, including Lartigue, Doisneau and Brassai. 
Certainly HCB had a typical Surrealist concern for sexuality. Imagine HCB's tall self looking with aloofness at the goodies:

Martine CB's legs

That particular school of ironic, unassuming but cosmopolitan  street shooters, could never have existed without the streets of Paris,  and their 'joie de vivre'.  Ah, to simply take a walk along the boulevards and the winding cobbled streets of bawdy Monmartre! Their very strange topology and dead ends evokes psychogeography

 Then the Nazi came and destroyed the very spirit of it, but HCB never forgot his light footed approach in the new kingdom he had been appointed by Magnum, Asia. 'You must understand the Chinese, he said, they are very traditionalist, but not unfriendly'. He took some *very* different aspects of Asia.

Sing-Song girl, China

Women in Srinagar, 1949, India.

 In 1956, with Krutschev putting an end to Stalinism, HCB was also the first Westerner to be allowed to freely photograph in Moscow, showing that Russians where not bloodthirsty monsters, 'but people like you and me'. 

That reportage landed Magnum a LOT of money' he gloated. The first years of Magnum had been financed basically by betting on horses, under the advice of their concierge. Ghandi of course was another scoop.

Please enjoy the two video recollections here and fetch yourself  'The Decisive Instant' with Matisse cover drawings, the first re-print in 60 years! (thank you TOP for pointing this up). If you buy it  you won't regret it, it won't break the bank.

Now you can download the French interview 'Le Siècle de Cartier-Bresson' from ArteTV, full quicktime version, here (warning, some 250 MB). Worth having if you speak French.

Or see  'The Decisive Moment' in English, uTube version, here.

Mind you, they are different recollections, and they are both original versions. HCB was bilingual, another interesting trait. Research now shows that bilinguals have twice the language centers, and that the brain therefore ages less. His recollections are indeed very clear headed, and funny  in both languages.

Sometimes it would be nice to do a deconstruction of HCB's more surrealist pictures. If you know about one, send the links in the comments or by mailbox. However I think we are breaking new ground here :)

Sony A7, or the Lego FF System

When the Sony A7 was introduced it made the effect of a bomb, in sites such as DPR. The dream of all the Planet's geeks had been fulfilled: to fit a 24x 36 sensor in the body of a compact

I was myself surprised and alarmed: had I invested in a system like m4/3 which had no future?

The price of the bodies between $ 1500 and 2000 was indeed very close to the E-M1, $ 1300, while resolution on paper was twice as much.

A massive sales factor is that while the Sony A7 had almost no native lenses (5 to be honest) it could take with adapters the whole Sony Alpha range, the E NEX range, and hear, hear, all the FF legacy beauties of the past, with adapters soon to be made by the Chinese. At their native focal range.

So , if you are familiar with mirrorless cameras, Sony aspired to become a universal digital back, because its short distance to flange allowed them to accommodate any FF35 lens, with no need  to correct the crop factor which other mirrorless systems have (as high as 2x, in the case of m4/3) with a focal reducer.

And although native FE lenses made by Zeiss are mostly expensive, in the specific case of the Zeiss 35mm FE, price and size € 600 are comparable with the Olympus 17mm while resolution allowed is almost the double.

So this is the equation: a win-win. Or is it? Karel Van Wolferen, an outstanding photog. who is testing legacy beauties on the A7r reports that when he went at Yodobashi, the main Tokyo shop, there was no crowds to tear an A7 from his hands.

From early tests it had indeed emerged what was the curse of 35FF mirrorless: most legacy lenses below 35mm, are unusable because of the aberrations due to both the short distance to flange, and big size of the sensor. 

It is not difficult to understand that once you substitute the flat plane of film with 3D electronic wells the extreme angles of light rays hitting them don't fill them and reach their bottom.

 It's a geometric problem, which affects the edges of the frame, with sometime heavy effects:  light falloff, and colour shift at the edges. Leica and Voigtlanders like the 15mm and 12mm became unusable. Some 21mm SLR lenses keep up the fight, but they are rare and in between.

At any rate you can't buy or adapt anything, with eyes closed. That is exactly what Karel Van Wolferen keeps on testing: each and every lens, on a case by case basis, bless him. Indeed early tests show, that below 35mm, very few lenses can be saved. You also need some very precise adapters.

Note meanwhile that the Sony A7 is the first digital FF to have the same size of the Leica M. No mean achievement!

Leica however introduced microlenses on the edges of the sensor to offset the slanted rays of light. It works quite well with Leica lenses, remarkably with Wide Angles. For Sony however the problem is to offset quite a number of unpredictable lenses of all kinds. Hence the approach case by case of Van Wolferen.

By comparison there is no such problem at the edges on m4/3 and APS sensors with short register, because they cut off the bad edges. So the problem becomes: is there a true advantage in adopting FF35 as a general format? Or is it better suited only for very specific genres, like Portrait and Landscape?

For Landscape there is a solution of course, but it is an expensive one. Native Lenses, like the v. expensive Zeiss FE 55mm Touit series, that will set you back by $ 1500. That of course gave me pause for thinking, and that explains the prudence of Japanese customers.

Main features of the different models

All the three A models are issued with the same frame, not taller or wider than a Leica M. The ambition is clearly to be a modern replacement at half the price, although the dSLR shape gives also the hint that this could be a replacement for cropped mirrorless, which have the same shape and slightly smaller size.

Sony has also reused sensors, probably  in order to keep prices down, but they are still the best in the industry anyway. You can find the A7 sensors in the Sony A99 and the A37.

The bodies have the same Tri-Nav wheels of the NEX 7, in addition to the Mode dial. One for EV compensation while the front and rear dials adjust shutter speed and aperture, and you can swap functions between dials.

Luckily they have adopted the menu system of Sony dSLR (A37), instead of the mind-boggling one the NEX. The A7 have their fair share of buttons, with two function ones, and others that are reconfigurable, so the camera can be set to a photographer's needs.

Imaging Resource did a thorough comparison with the  best models of the industry and there is no doubt that Sony's sensors at the top of the resolved detail. Check here the A7 and here the A7r for comparisons with other top cameras.

To summarize: the Sony have more or the same resolution of a Nikon D800 top of line in half the size!

So there is some substance to the claim the A7 to be the New Leica. Same size, best resolution and top German lenses - Zeiss 35/2.8 goes 1320 lines full open!  according to Roger Cicala. of Lensrentals.

Where the Sony A seems to be still lacking, but that could change, is in the AF speed. Only the A has CDAF+PDAF, and thus good tracking, while the Ar has only CDAF and thus is slower than its sibling. 

According to Lensrentals the A7r resolution with the 35/2.8 Zeiss is the top of the industry. 

Cicala however tested it also with adapted Canon lenses and the Sony A7r beats the Canon 5d bodies when mounting their own Canon lenses!

This might be explained by the lack of AA filter, and the rumored offset microlenses in the A7r, as well as the gapless array of its new sensors.

OTH the Sony Ar doesn't have the front curtain electronic shutter of the A, which allows to attenuate the loud plonk of the shutter., and its alleged shutter shock. 

Flash synchro in the A is 1/160 instead than 1/125 in the A7r, and drive mode is faster, about 5 fps instead of 4 fps in the Ar. 

RAW recording times are allegedly slow, and both cameras take their time to wake up.
Another CON for both cameras is the lack of IBIS - in camera stabilization.

My temporary conclusion: to reach full resolution you must be a better photographer than with my Olympus OM-D because of the unwanted blur and loss of resolution that will happen far easier with a larger sensor than with smaller, cropped sensors. 

Simply because a bigger resolution requires a steadier hand, or a tripod, while there is no general stabilization to lean on. 

DOF  also is less forgiving in 24x36. In a portrait if you focus on the eyes, the tip of the nose might be OOF .

courtesy Meicw, flickr

Consider also that the Olympus OM-D have almost twice the operational performance of the Sony. The Jpeg engine of the OM-D is also so good that it's difficult to tell the 16 Mpx resolution  apart from the A's 24 Mpx. You can detect a difference only in the Ar, which at 36Mpx, has more than twice as many pixels as the OM-D.

So is it worth it? If you work with Stock Agencies exacting at least 20 Mpx for landscapes, certainly. For Journalism and Fashion, which rely on content, or even Marriage, I am unconvinced. An OM-D or a Fuji X with their great per pixel resolution might be enough, and operate faster. Stock wise, you can always uprez your pictures.

There's however a question looming. Have the cropped mirrorless reached limits to growth with the 16 Mpx Sony sensor?

Did Sony change format because it  saw that it couldn't break the 16 Mpx limit on a small sensor, without getting less resolution, like it actually happened  with the NEX 7?

So will in the future the difference in resolution between cropped and FF formats tend to accentuate?  That's the investment decision to consider. Which lenses to get should be the main consideration: cropped or FF35? You can't duplicate the investment, with the current prices!

Courtesy Sushicam, flickr. A7.

There is also the A7s, which has chosen a third way. To downgrade to 12 Mpx in order to achieve and even better Dynamic Range, and the extraordinary sensitivity of 504,000 ISO. Technical data being still missing I might review it in a further post.

Finally a last consideration. By the various reviews, especially the one at Imaging-Resource, there is no way that the A7s are going to compete with top dSLR, the latter being too fast in operational speed. So Sports might be a forbidden territory.

However if you check the Imaging-Resources comparison, the Sony sensors are the highest resolving of all, so here is the paradox. A camera for enthusiasts that beats in resolution the Canons and Nikons top of the line, while not being bigger than an Olympus, or a Fuji.

Quite a few things to ponder, before pulling out the wallet. Consider also that coming models and updates will fix the teething problems.

The areas that might be improved by firmware or in future models are AF and operational speed. Getting IBIS (perhaps from Olympus), getting more native lenses ( a lot are coming!) and fixing that loud shutter that introduces vibration, unwanted attention and possibly shutter shock.

So what to do?  Because of its modular nature and very recent introduction the whole system deserves to wait and see how it evolves. 

A7, Flickr.

What I personally find very attractive is the Zeiss 35/2.8 and its splendid performance, at just EU 600.  So I might wait to see If the kit comes down in price and buy adapters for my Zeiss Jena 50, and Jupiter 85/2, and perhaps add an adapted UWA from Samyang. Far from expensive.

Start a new system? Too old for that. For operational speed and Street I'd keep my E-M5.

Other solution might be to wait for Photokina and see if and how Fuji and Olympus go FF.

Check also the review at DPreview. They gave the A7r and the A7 Gold and Silver award respectively, but they also spoke out the Cons.

So could  this be a Leica M substitute of a kind? There are some bugs in the design to fix. AF will certainly evolve for the better, like it did in the Fuji X-T1, the Olympus E-M1, and the Panny GX-7.

However, because of the lesser Mpx to process, smaller sensors like m4/3 will probably always be faster, and better with tele lenses because of the 1,5 or 2x crop factor, so your choice. IBIS with teles also gives a considerable advantage: it's like having an invisible steadycam.

For more deliberate tasks like Portrait and Landscape however the Sony A7 might well become the new Industry standard in mirrorless. It's the equivalent of what in film was called the Medium Format. A very portable Medium Format, indeed.

Nadja, or the Surrealist City.

When Andre' Breton starts to write his illustrated short novel 'Nadja'  in 1928 Paris still looks very much like Eugène Atget had documented it: quite drab and deserted, very far from the dizzy atmosphere of Tolouse Lautrec, and the pageant of the Crazy Horse, and the Belle Epoque.

 WWI and its millions deaths had transformed and emptied the suburbs and the neighborhoods of the poor. Among the opening pictures in Nadja is that of a statue, a military called Eugène Dolet, of which Breton says that it both attracted and repelled him. 

To the reader the authoritarian statue  seems very much in contrast with the poetical style of writing, except that perhaps it establishes some ominous expectation which is in contrast with it.

Breton uses a symbolist style of the earlier generation of poets, Mallarme' and Rimbaud, but the photos are  describing an ordinary stroll in Paris, and the reader/onlooker expects something to develop out of the contrast. The next photo is 'Bois & Charbons' the picture of a ordinary shop of wood and coal, but with a cavernous aspect, as if an ogre dwelt there.

Breton is establishing a net of personal meaningful places that defines both a theatre set for the novel, and an interior landscape where an action is going to take place.
At first it will be the meeting with an actress friend who relates a lurid, Grand-Guignol show Les Detraquées, (The Cranks) based on serial assassinations in a college of young girls, made by the head mistress, with the complicity of her lesbian friend. Again the reader is shown the picture of a real scene.

Here again photography is used to confer reality to what might otherwise seems a series of fantasies. But in so doing the text  establishes the city as a country of imagination, where one can expect both crime and love. 

The surrealist group headed by Breton was soon to use the camera as a mechanical artifact to play with chance and evoke the unconscious. Man Ray used cut ups and 'rayographs'  made directly on sensitive paper in the  darkroom. William Burroughs and Brian Gysin later invented the Dream Machine projecting  hypnotic rays of light. The Camera Obscura saw its uses expanded . Here, however, it is used used in a simple mimetic way, but in an enigmatic way, in relation to the text.

Back to the novel, Breton progresses to a fleamarket where he finds a strange phallus-like white sculpture with coloured lines, which he later understands to be a three dimensional statistic of a city. It's a typical 'objet trouvé',  whose meaning has been displaced by the mind in a perverted way - he says. It is the birth of Détournement, symbolic displacement, which will have a central role in Surrealism, when becoming deliberate.

In fact the poet is establishing his own inner theatre where  a momentous happening is going to take place. In the street he crosses and stops  an attractive blonde with an unfinished make up, and a poor dress, who expresses herself by riddles: Nadja "whose name in Russian means hope, but it only the beginning of it" she says.

By coincidence Breton just a moment earlier was thinking of the Russian revolution, but also noting that ordinary work, that of the people leaving the offices, had very little to do with imagination. 

Nadja, who is looking for work,  nevertheless appears as a  messenger, the Angel of Revolution, coming to drab Paris, as if she had wanted to meet in person the poet, instead of being stopped by him.

It is as if there was a collapse of the inner expectation and outside reality,  between the subjective and the objective, which is brought about by desire.

Of Nadja however we will know little of her external appearance.  Instead we get some riddles  and some extraordinary drawings that she gives to Breton. 

They are the  the  token of her visions, like a flower  with a double set of petal-eyes, a symbol of inner beauty and  Love. "la fleur des amants". 

 Nadja is  a seismograph, telling Breton  she sees him as being drawn to a Bright Star, which is like 'the heart of a flower without a heart'. Breton is very moved.

Later  we learn that Breton, who at the time was married  had at the same time an affair with the actress Blanche Derval who had played in the Grand Guignol piece mentioned earlier in the novel. 

Of her we have a portrait,  which acts like a more material incarnation of Nadja. It is as if a photo, an objective correlative, wouldn't be able to catch Nadja's otherworldly nature. So the  portrait of Blanche must act as a displacement of Nadja. Breton compares the makeup of the two women, mentioning that one is too light for theatre and the other too heavy for the street -  and so makes an equivalence.

Nadja instead is only evoked by her  her 'regard de fougère' her 'fern look' while she meets the author in  ominous places, like the Sphinx Hotel, or the square of the Mazda Light billboard. 

She draws the author as a fierce cat with flaming hair and folded eagle wings along the sides, and herself as Melusine, a water nymph, whose lower body is made by a fish tail. It is clearly a figure of the Unconscious, but also of European legends. Melusine predicts the future and is a fairy queen of the inner world.

We are given  some other drawings of Nadja, : Le bouclier d'Achille, le Reve du chat, le Salut du Diable.
The drawing here at the top of the post, will be used as a cover for the book - it is the portrait of a  a fortune teller, a seer who is perhaps Nadja herself.

 Indeed she is able to interpret correctly some of the most complex paintings by De Chirico or Max Ernst, which hang at Andre's home.

 The drawings of Nadja operate on a different level from realistic photographs. They are 'apparitions', dream-like material of the Unconscious. Photography however documents them as real as the Paris' statues.

Some, like Le Reve du Chat,  a fugitive cat with the tail held by the wick of an invisible oil lamp (The Lamp of Wisdom?) , are cut ups of ordinary appearances  united in a paradoxical way, which suggests a further meaning. Cut ups  were to become typical of Surrealist art, as in Man Ray or Max Ernst.

Ordinary life reclaims  its rights, however.  The way Breton and Nadja separate each other only after a few days of acquaintance is an object of comment by  Katharine Conley's The Automatic Woman. Not only was Breton married, but he also ignored that Nadja was mad. Suddenly we are reminded of the stark facts of life.

Nadja was to return to the province she came from, Lille, presumably to solve her money problems, but was instead hospitalized.. When Breton discovered it he simply mentions that the hospital  probably did her more evil than good, by making a prisoner of her.

She had made him a seer and confirmed him to be an artist with a higher destiny, (The Bright Star)  but he never took the trouble to go and visit  her, preferring to make her the central character of a novel which was an immediate success - Conley comments sardonically. 

In an amazing displacement  of desire, Breton  shows instead of Nadja a portrait of actress Blanche Derval, who differently from Nadja, was resisting  his desire. The reader will never know what the real Nadja looked like.

Curiously Blanche in the Detraquées  abducted  an innocent schoolgirl. But it is as if Breton who performed an Identity Theft by substituting portraits.

Now, what is my relationship to surrealism? Although I am rather Post-avantgarde, and therefore eclectic, Surrealism is part of my culture, especially in the sense of Psychogeography: I am driven both by uncanny and the Sublime, but also the very simple, and the unexplainable.

I met some of the last surrealists, like Arturo Schwarz, the critic and collector of Marcel Duchamp -  I invited to Rome William Burroughs and Bryan Gysin, the writer and artist friends, who invented the Dream Machine. I missed by a hair Francesca Woodman, the photographer, who had sent me an illustrated postcard of her. They all switched a trigger, by alerting me to the imagination gap in Realism, which is the current ideology in photography. Any image is more than what it purports to be.

There is a photograph in 'Nadja' of which I have by coincidence a precise equivalent: Breton says:  'Devant nous fuse un jet d'eau, dont elle parait suivre la courbe'. 'Before us springs a water jet, whose curve she seems to follow'

                    

 What is the attraction they have in common? To me they are both mimetic and enigmatic, although they lack the optical tricks of later Surrealist imagery.

The conclusion of the book is Breton's famous sentence, which seems a sad epitaph to Nadja's madness: 'La beauté' sera convulsive ou ne sera pas' 'Beauty will be convulsive, or will not be at all'.

Strangely the closing photo of  the novel is that of Becque, another authoritarian military bust in a square of Paris,  like the one in the beginning of the book. It is as if the drab postwar reality had reasserted  its role, by closing the doors of Imagination. Hence beauty must be convulsive, to shake off  the smothering  of Repression.

That was a lesson learned by the time of the revolution of May '68, when the walls of hospices crumbled down, and imagination was again 'au pouvoir'.
Sexual liberation met social criticism, as it had done first in the Surrealist Movement.

It took more to liberate women, however.  That is why it will be interesting to dedicate another post in the future to Francesca Woodman, the 'Rimbaud of Photography', who used her own body to create surrealist photography in the 1970s.

Notes

 According to the legend Melusine can't be watched  in her private rooms possibly because of her animal  fish tail.  Her noble husband who peeps at her while she begets her three daughters. will be punished by them, and be prevented to reign.

I recently learned with surprise that Melusine was the begetter of the House of Lusignan, kings of Portugal, and of the two kings of Jerusalem, Amalric I and II, of whom I carry the name by mere chance. The  nick had attracted me, for no other reason that it was neither English, nor Latin.
  So it is again a strange coincidence that I was to cross the path of Melusine, such a strong protectress of imagination.
A Melusine  was also Queen of Cyprus, which she defended successfully against  the hordes of Saladdin's sons in the 1400s. She was reputed as a beautiful, cultivated woman.

In the end, despite the efforts at occultation of Breton, a family portrait of Nadja (Leona Delcourt) has finally been unearthed in 2009 by her biographer, HESTER ALBACH.

Here she is:

She was indeed a sweet child, with 'un regard de fougère' - and yet a 'force multiplier' for the Surrealist Movement.The finding of her portrait settles the debt of the first visual novel of Modernism.

Aleksandr Rodchenko, the Revolutionary

“The modern city with its multi-storey buildings, plants, factories [...], all this [...] has changed the psychology of the traditional perception to a great extent. It seems as if only a camera is able to illustrate modern life.” (Alexander Rodchenko).

.
We are all dwarfs on the shoulders of giants.

When Rodchenko began his career as a graphic artist under the Russian revolution he was already well known as a cubist painter, but his career skyrocketed with the use of the camera, one of the first Leicas, that he bought in Paris. Happy times when Leicas were still accessible to poor artists! The Leica could then be had for 133 roubles.

(Alexander_Rodchenko Wikipedia)

At a time when photographers were still stuck in the painterly debate between the Picturesque and the Sublime in the depiction of Nature, he famously declared that no picture should even be taken 'from the belly button level' and pointed his lens from plunging angles exclusively to cityscapes and the big demonstrations of the Revolution.

You might object to the ideology, and the rhetoric, but not to his impeccable visuals. It was the first time that proletarians got to see each other - bourgeois and the countryside having being the main subject of Victorianism - and so the tradition of social Reportage began with the march of Russian masses. 

Rodchenko graphical imagination was after the geometry of serial lines, in plunging perspectives, in stark black and whites,  in what came to be known as Constructivism: the city itself appeared as a giant factory. He was not far from F. Lang's 'Metropolis',  but in Germany  too a revolution had taken place, with the Spartacist days of Rosa Luxemburg.

In Russia Aleksandr gravitated in the highly progressive entourage of the poets Majakovsky, Osip and Lilya Brik - LEF, Left for Art,  their review was called - and it helped him keep the revolutionary momentum. He reduced his cubist paintings to monochromes, and then declared that painting was dead, in favor of the camera. There were rumors that Lilya offered her favors to Rodchenko while posing for advertising posters, but free love was usual then between comrades, so nothing shocking.

Rodchenko was a personal friend of Dziga Vertov, the outstanding film maker and inventor of Cinéma Vérité, photography never being far away of the documentary. How many talents fed each other in those early days of the Revolution!

Steel horses
steal the first cubes
jumping from the windows
of fleeting houses.
Swan-necked belfries
bend in electric-wire nooses!
The giraffe-hide sky unlooses
motley carrot-top bangs.
The son
of patternless fields
is dappled like trout.
Concealed by clocktower faces,
a magician
pulls
rails from the muzzle of a tram.

(From street to street - V.V. Majakovky)

A small Leica indeed allowed Rodcenko to record the city and its masses from a birds-eye POV which had never been attempted before.

Painting was to undergo a similar destiny in France and the US, but only 20 years later, with Informal Art and Klein's monochromes. So often revolutions speed up changes in art too.

 Rodchenko was also in touch  with Moholy-Nagy of the Bauhaus. Together they started  industrial art and design. Later however he was accused of having copied the Germans. Small minds!

I had a similar experience in the 1970s when I rediscovered Futurism. By using abstract décors like Balla had done, and by doing away with actors, we introduced installations and performance into theater. A Tabula Rasa took place in 1977-1979, with Teatro di Postavanguardia in Rome. A renaissance that was to last only a few years, before our funds were cut.

Rodchenko had showed that Landscape was just a bourgeois convention. We abolished the scene, and so the spectators became the actors. In Rodchenko pictures the actors were everyday people and thus he also launched Street Shooting, in a far more radical way of what had been  attempted  by Eugène Atget in his documentation of Paris.

Certainly the Leica, replacing the view camera, helped to catch the decisive instant, without the need for Atget's poses. The dynamic lines showed History in Action.

(Girl with a Leica)

Rodchenko also identified diagonal lines as the internal contradiction in respect to the square lines of the frame, thus a metaphor of movement. By destroying static lines he suggested the the breaking down of the image in lesser elements, doing away with the illusion that a picture is an innocent holistic reproduction of Nature. Realism, as an ideology, went out of the the window too. Bodies appeared  estranged from the conventions of the Portrait.

Rodcenko had a heavy price to pay for these innovations: during the purges he was put under trial and accused of 'Formalism': thus to have betrayed the Party and the masses.  It was a terrible accusation, therefore he was threatened to give up all his official jobs.

 So  after shooting for a while the Regime's celebrations he stopped, and began instead to work as a curator of other photographers, who celebrated the achievements of  Socialist Realism and the Five-years Plans of the Regime. 

The same Return to Order was taking place  with the celebratory 'Olympia' in Berlin under Hitler, and in the Fascist regimes, with their notion of a National art opposed to Degenerate Art, cultural hypocrisy being well spread on the surface of the planet.

BTW the plunging, slanted lines of Rodchenko have resurfaced, almost as a trademark, in the Freestyle type of shooting skateboarding in the Social Medias. It is even apparent  in the selfies of Smartphones, all gravity being lost in the Space Age.  

And yet even now  I still have to remind myself not to fall in the old convention, so strongly the tradition of a straight horizon  is entrenched in Landscape. Instead  one must use geometry to advantage, but not necessarily in a Naturalist way.

If you want to understand and learn to deconstruct the main genres of photography, beginning from Portrait and Landscape, those two genres laden with commonplaces, you'd do nothing better than read "Photography, the key concepts" by David Bate, of Westminster University.

To him Landscape is almost invariably an artificial construct built with an aim to order. No picture is an innocent search for beauty. He considers the 1930 as a key period, mentioning a parallel with the American f/64 group. here

On the other hand Old Europe, which is never really so old, did a beautiful Rodchenko retrospective in Summer 2013 in Vienna, at the Westlicht Gallery.

They had some of the best Rodchenko's quotes:

“Photography – the new, fast and real reflection of the world – should make it possible to map the world from all points of view [...]. In order to educate man to a new vision, everyday familiar objects must be shown to him with totally unexpected perspectives and in unexpected situations. New objects should be depicted from different sides in order to provide a complete impression of the object.”

.
“We must revolutionize our optical perception. We must remove the veil from our eyes.”

.
“Contradictions of perspective. Contrasts of light. Contrasts of form. Points of view impossible to achieve in drawing and painting. Foreshortenings with a strong distortion of the objects, with a crude handling of matter. Moments altogether new, never seen before… compositions whose boldness outstrips the imagination of painters… Then the creation of those instants which do not exist, contrived by means of photomontage. The negative transmits altogether new stimuli to the sentient mind and eye.”

.
Alexander Rodchenko