Not to be

No, photographic immediacy is hard to achieve in writing - so here is how Thompson expanded his ideal idea of gonzo journalism (and this is the purple passage that I had in mind on Monday night; it is located along with the Cartier-Bresson passage in The Great Shark Hunt around page 115):

True gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he's writing it – or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character.