G'Day!

Busting Out Lose yourself or find yourself: you have to know what you're travelling for, writes Robert Dessaix. "Not long ago in Paris (where I was travelling to explore a particular kind of emotional landscape I can't find at home) I chanced upon a superb exhibition of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of my favourites. I was little interested in the technical side to his photography, or in the social realities of Spain in the '30s or Russia in the '50s. I was simply curious to know why I found them so beautiful, despite the utter banality of the moments depicted. (And, God knows, travel is mostly made up of utterly banal moments.) Then it struck me. Like a thief on a bicycle, Cartier-Bresson seizes an instant of self-awareness in his subjects as he passes, or at least an awareness of the unrepeatability of the given moment - a priest hurrying along a country road in full regalia, laughing boys leaping off a wall, ecstatic faces in the crowd at the Coronation - against a timeless, classically structured background. Perhaps that's how we should travel. Perhaps inadvertently Cartier-Bresson hit on the secret of how to fit all those hours, days, even weeks of sitting about on drab railway-stations, in drab hotel-rooms and drab restaurants into a larger picture we will remember as illuminatingly beautiful." MORE->