Clifton Beach
“For me, the camera is a sketchbook, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.”
— Henri Cartier-Bresson
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Fifty years ago, Cape Town’s Clifton beach was an immensely popular hangout for teenagers and young adults. A few hardy lifeguard types swam in the gorgeous but frigid Atlantic, but most of us were there to socialize and, in my case, study female anatomy. This was a Whites Only beach and Blacks were not allowed there except as nannies.
I was a medical student at the time and would often bring my books to the beach to study. This day, I looked up and saw an unusual sight - an African woman with her own children here. They were walking in one direction passing several White teenagers heading in the opposite. I leapt to my feet and snapped this picture, at the very moment their paths intercepted and one of the children fell in the soft sand. Privileged, the Whites were of course walking on the more comfortable compact wet sand.
I immediately recognized the symbolism. In Apartheid-era South Africa, the impoverished Africans were moving into the future while the entitled White teenagers were moving to the past.
Timing is everything in street photography. Over a century ago, Alfred Stieglitz noted that the contribution of photography to the art world was its ability to freeze a moment of time. Henri Cartier-Bresson then was able to expand on this by articulating the principle of the decisive moment. Fritz Perles, the father of Gestalt Therapy, later described the present as the ever-moving point between past and future. This scene was frozen at the decisive moment where past and future intercepted.
This act of photographing this took seconds; it took decades before I was to learn of street photography as a concept and genre. During this time, cameras have gotten better, photographs become sharper and brighter, yet this photo taken with a cheap film camera, is perfect for me. Street photography is so much more than creating the perfect image.
