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Cartier-Bresson

fame flickering flame

By | photography

I own this photobook “Italia” by Guido Piovene (ed. Carlo Bestetti, Roma, 1955) with rather nice black and white photographs, of which I recognized a few rightaway. Where or when I bought it I don’t remember. I looked at the index…Alinari, Bischof, Cartier & Bresson…..Cartier & Bresson ??…  was he still so unknown then that they took his name to be a cooperation between 2 different photographers ?

I think of Robert Frank (bless his somber spells – I adore his work!) who was quoted to have remarked: “So I’m famous, now what…” So what indeed. “On…” Samuel Beckett would have remarked. Now there’s another genius for you. But who’s reading his books nowadays (and I don’t mean Waiting for Godot). Well, there’s me, for one.

f…. was a dirty word

By | photography

When I started taking photographs, ages ago, Henri Cartier-Bresson was the photographers’ pope so to speak. He had three dogmas for the believers, I had understood from reading the photo magazines and his own books (fortunately my French was not too bad):

first, there is a “decisive moment” for the photograph to be taken. Up to a point, there is certainly some truth in it, but some indecisive moments will do very well, I have meanwhile discovered. And it’s so irritating that every nitwit art critic with some general interest, preoccupied with knowledge but not even looking, comes up with this term to show he “knows about photography too”, even if there is no use for it.

second, you always used the whole negative, and sometimes even proudly showed you did so by including a subtle black border around the image on the paper print. There were even “styles” in the shaping of the outside of the border – some photographers used hand-torn carton frames to replace the narrow and sharp-edged metal frames that went with the enlarger. I even understood that Diane Arbus photographs (mostly posthumous prints) can be categorized and dated by their treatment of the image edge, soft without black border, narrow black border, uneven borders etc. 

third, and here comes the f….word, you should never use flash, Cartier-Bresson said, since it was “intolerably aggressive”, destroying the atmosphere, making the presence of the intruding photographer very obvious, and in fact, changing the whole action. That’s what he said and I was not unhappy to have an excuse not to use it for I did not have a lot of experience with it.

Then came house parties. I had done little work with flash and felt insecure about it. I had an electronic flash unit that was basic, but clumsy. Its head turned when I brushed against somebody’s shoulder and people froze like wild animals caught in car lights because it was blinding. This had to change. I bought two identical dedicated Nikon speedlights, since I worked with two identical cameras as well. Using also identical settings was the ideal solution. I soon found out after experimenting on a few films what the best combination of depth of field/stepped down lighting was. I had given up the idea of using the room lights, as there were unworkable extremes and strobes and lots of darkness, which did not go well with the detail that I strived for; I wanted to fill the frame with relevant information till it almost burst.  Flash made it all possible.That is how I overcame my initial fear of flashlight. I know I can use it for my kind of photography whenever I feel the need for it. Certainly in a house club with all its moving and pulsating lights no one will object either.

tourist remover

By | street photography

Only a few days ago I was walking in the icy drizzle of late winter in the beautiful medieval center of the French town of Dinan, Bretagne, paying attention not to slip on its equally picturesque cobblestoned streets. It reminded me of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s book “Les Européens”. There were few people on the streets and only a few families, looking a bit lost while visiting the fairground along the river bank.
I had just bought a postcard of Cartier-Bresson’s man jumping over a puddle, which was almost the only one of interest in the whole Super U shopping mall, apart from some Doisneau cards.
But in this cold and wet town I missed the people to bring it to life. I was holding my Contax in my pocket, but didn’t take anything.
A thought struck me: the Tourist Remover! I had only just recently learned about this program with its ominous name which can remove anything that moves from your digital snaps. You just take a series with some intervals and the program “sees” what moves, removing it and filling the gap with what it perceives as permanent. If only those digitally removed tourists remained floating somewhere in cyberspace…. How happily would I use them to fill my empty streets! A program called “Tourist Adder” for the street photographer? But I’m not a digital photographer. On second thoughts, no thanks, I’ll manage, I’ll deal with reality.