As snow falls, a fulmar petrel flies past Skógafoss waterfall in Iceland. This waterfall drops from a height of 60 m. In spring, many fulmar petrels (Fulmar glacialis) come to nest on the cliffs surrounding the waterfall. Iceland, April 17, 2014.
To accompany the release of his book Lumière, published by Éditions Allary, Matthieu Ricard is offering a series of blogs on photography. An invitation to share wonder, celebrate the beauty of the world, and continue the quest for light that has guided him throughout his sixty-year journey.
I met Henri Cartier-Bresson in my adolescence. He had studied painting with my mother, Yahne Le Toumelin (1923–2023), in André Lhote’s studio just before the Second World War, and had remained a friend of my parents. I showed him my first photographs, in particular a portrait of a young girl seen through a fogged-up windowpane, of which I was very proud, but which did not impress him at all! As he said elsewhere: “Your first ten thousand photographs will be your worst.” I was still only at the first few hundred… Later, when we became close friends, he shared with me a principle André Lhote had taught him: “A good composition should be able to be looked at just as well upside down as right side up,” and he gave me a few demonstrations, images in support.
In 1996, when my first photo book was published in the United States, Journey to Enlightenment (translated into French under the title L’Esprit du Tibet), I showed Henri the proofs in his Paris apartment. This time, he silently examined the book’s plates, lingering over each page, especially the portraits of spiritual masters. I left for India the next day. When I arrived, a fax from Henri was waiting for me: “I was walking in the Tuileries gardens and this sentence came to me: ‘Matthieu’s spiritual life and his camera are one; from that arise these fleeting and eternal images.’”
“The photos take me, not the other way around,” Cartier-Bresson used to say. That is how I feel things. Sometimes, indeed, a moment comes when the people, the place, and the light appear to me in such a way that I cannot resist capturing an image and offering it to all who will lay eyes on it. The ideal is to live in the places where one photographs, so that time works in your favor: an exceptional scene presents itself to your gaze and you are there. Then I study that scene carefully to determine the best way to pay it homage and preserve the impression I felt in the moment. There are also photographs I regret not taking. One day in Calcutta, in the 1970s, I saw a man struggling to pull a rickshaw behind which a horse was tethered, following at the end of a rope. I still have that image in my head, not on film. “One of these days, I’ll publish a book of all the photos I didn’t take. It will be a huge success,” wrote René Burri, the eminent Magnum photographer.
I have often contemplated and admired the work of great photographers—Ansel Adams, Ernst Haas (his masterpiece The Creation in particular, which I revisit regularly), and many others. I have formed friendships with a number of photographers I admire—Jim Brandenburg, Vincent Munier, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Steve McCurry, to name only a few besides Cartier-Bresson. I keep learning through their company. At times I find myself contemplating an especially striking or inspiring image and soaking in its beauty, its composition, or the message it conveys—an image that will remain etched in my memory and enrich my vision. From my humble point of view, a successful photograph is an image one never tires of contemplating, one that gives a feeling of elevation or awakens our conscience to a human tragedy. The great painter Joan Miró said on the subject: “You can look at an image for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at an image for a second and remember it all your life.”
I appreciate rich colors as much as “color without colors”: a white bird flying in front of a waterfall under falling snow. Danielle Föllmi, with whom I collaborated on Buddhist Himalaya, our joint book with Olivier Föllmi, once told me that I “painted with light.” I don’t think I live up to such a compliment, but it reflects the ideal I pursue in photography.
A painter must train at his art for months, years, a whole lifetime… By comparison, the art of photography may seem easy. Isn’t it enough just to press the shutter? But as the illustrious publisher and scenographer Robert Delpire noted, “That is precisely what makes it difficult.”
One Sunday morning, Henri Cartier-Bresson invited me for breakfast. He had also arranged to meet a Newsweek journalist at eight-thirty—an unusual day and time for an interview! We were seated at the table with his wife, Martine Franck, herself a great photographer, when the journalist arrived. A little intimidated, he sat down opposite Henri and placed his pen and a notepad on the large round table of waxed wood. Pointing to the notebook, Henri asked, “Are you with the police?” After that slightly disconcerting opening, the journalist asked the classic question: “What makes a good photographer?” To which Henri retorted: “I’m not a photographer. I prefer drawing. Besides, anyone can be a photographer; all you need is a camera.” Martine stepped in to temper his words: “Come on, Henri, you know that isn’t true!” The rest of the interview went on more normally, to the journalist’s great relief.
Yes, it is easy to press the shutter: you will always get a result. And if you are lucky, if the tableau offered by a face or a landscape is immensely beautiful, it is quite possible that your first photo will be a masterpiece. But this ease is deceptive: like the painter, the photographer spends a lifetime learning to see things he would never have seen before and to translate them into images one never tires of contemplating. “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see,” Henry David Thoreau reminded us. All my life I have learned to spot a detail, to be moved by a composition, by the immensity of a landscape, to seize a fleeting light, the sparkle of a gaze, a magical moment, and to pay them homage as best I can. For Don McCullin, “If you feel nothing when you are in front of a subject or a landscape, there is little chance people will feel something when they look at your photos.”
Over the years, one’s eye is educated, refined, and allows us to see better what is present, what the world and beings offer us. Then it is a matter of making colors vibrate and light sing in order to recover that feeling of being struck, of thought breaking off, and of rapture that was ours when contemplating a face, the immensity of a sky, the majesty of a mountain, the evanescence of a reflection, the labyrinths of bark, or the intimacy of a flower. “The pictures are there; you just have to take them,” said Robert Capa, co-founder of Magnum with Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Images of violence and suffering are necessary to awaken consciences and inspire our determination to intervene, to contribute, to remedy injustices. Let us be inspired by Nelson Mandela’s words so as not to lose sight of the transformative potential that lies within each of us: “Love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite. Even in the worst moments of prison, when my comrades and I were at our limit, I always saw a glimmer of humanity in one of the guards—perhaps for a second, but it was enough to reassure me and allow me to continue. Man’s goodness is a flame that can be hidden, but never extinguished.” It is important to maintain a fair balance and avoid falling into the “mean-world syndrome” that makes us think human beings are fundamentally bad and the world without hope. When one of my photo albums—my only one in black and white, Visages de paix, terres de sérénité—was published in 2015, the weekly L’Express ran an article titled “Reporter of peace,” an epithet I accept with joy.
It is not obvious to express this ideal through images, but I have tried to evoke the gentleness of a child with an innocent gaze, the serenity of an old man with a toothless smile, or the inner beauty of a benevolent spiritual master, and to share the wonder that seized me before a sublime landscape. Photography, Cartier-Bresson also said, consists in “putting on the same line of sight the head, the eye, and the heart.”
In 1999, I was invited to exhibit at Visa pour l’Image in Perpignan. Some thirty exhibitions portrayed grave and painful subjects—bloody conflicts such as the Kosovo war, mafia control in Sicily, the torments of famine in Sudan, and drug addictions gnawing at Brooklyn. Only three exhibitions—those of Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Olivier Föllmi, and mine—offered a positive vision of human nature. My choice to photograph this better side of human nature and the wonders of the wild part of the world does not stem either from blindness to the world’s misery or from naive optimism. It is a natural inclination of mine—I have always found it difficult to photograph suffering and decay. This choice is also inspired by the wish to counterbalance the predominance of “bad news” in our media, a phenomenon probably rooted in our evolution, which predisposes us to be vigilant in the face of danger. Yet horrors are always being perpetrated somewhere in the world, and suffering is never lacking. This approach remains imbued with the greatest respect for those who document conflicts, persecutions, forced migrations, and other human tragedies. I have known many war correspondents and I measure the heavy personal toll they have paid to be witnesses—too often powerless—of acts of barbarity as absurd as they are atrocious.
Steve McCullin said about his work: “For a long time I was uncomfortable with my label as a war photographer, which suggested an almost exclusive interest in other people’s suffering. I knew I was capable of giving voice to another one.” (He now devotes himself to landscape photography…) He notably photographed the famine that ravaged Biafra between 1967 and 1970, and it was his images and those of other committed photographers that sparked an immense surge of solidarity around the world. He said of this: “The least I can do is try to articulate these stories with as much compassion and clarity as they deserve, with as strong a voice as possible. Anything less would be mercenary work.” Sebastião Salgado too has never ceased to engage himself for the landless and for the protection of the forests of his country of origin, Brazil. He has forcefully denounced the perversion of poverty at the heart of abundance, as well as the exploitation of humans by their peers, notably through his photographs of Brazilian gold mines.
You can find this entire photographic project in Lumière, published by Éditions Allary.
Matthieu Ricard donates all of his income—royalties from his books, photographs, and lectures—to development projects run by the Karuna-Shechen association, which works to reduce poverty and empower the most vulnerable women, men, and children. In this way, every reader becomes a direct contributor to solidarity through their purchase.
