Jubilant Days: WPC

Of all the photos I’ve ever seen, my favourite is a b&w image taken by Henri Cartier – Bresson in Paris, on the Rue de Mouffetard in 1954 – a scruffy, small boy carrying a large bottle of wine under each arm, gets the admiration of others in the street as he struts home, head held high, jubilant. For a long time, I had this poster.

At an exhibition of Cartier-Bresson’s work at the Queensland Art Gallery in 2011, I copied down his quote on the back of my ticket stub.

Life isn’t made up of stories that you cut into slices like an apple pie. There’s no standard way of approaching a story. We have to evoke a situation, a truth; this is the poetry of life’s reality. H.C-B.

Perhaps this is a ‘jubilant’  image – this photo of a Scotsman at a wedding. He had just  piped the couple out after the ceremony. Here, he is heading for the Wedding Reception.

This photo isn’t one of mine: the camera was. Does there need to be more people in the frame to make it jubilant?

I did ask the piper what was the purpose of those drones in a set of bagpipes – after all, they make such a dismal noise. He replied that without the drones he might as well be playing the piano.

“You just have to live and life will give you pictures.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson

All text (except those in italics) by Meg. Photo by G. McQueen

Poster sale http://www.ebay.com/itm/RUE-MOUFFETARD-PARIS-1954-16×20-/321696915618

Story Twigs the Imagination! by Meg Philp is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Jubilant