HCB exhibit at MOMA in New York

Harry Lime

Harry Lime

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There currently is a huge HCB retrospective at MOMA in NY.

Here are the photos from the exhibit.

http://moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/henricartierbresson/#/homepage/themes.html

Each category leads to a selection of images. There must be about 300 in total. Nice hires scans.

A lot of this material is new to me and I have probably seen all of his books. It looks like they went through his archive and tried to show something new for a change.


Interesting technical note. I was looking at the images from the "Bankers Trust Company, New York. 1960" and I swear they were shot with at least a 35mm, some maybe even a 28mm. It's old news that he didn't only use a 50mm, but it's pretty obvious with these.
 
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As I posted somewhere else on RFF, I was a bit disappointed in the show. Many of the prints were of such low contrast that I thought they were fading (MOMA thought that people would be disappointed with the quality of the prints so the first couple of panels are a review of different printing styles. They say he printed low contrst as that was the style in the 1930s.)

As Harry Lime says, there were lots of prints in the show - but not all were HCB at his best! I thought many of them were quite ordinary and not up to the HCB "standard." All of the prints were small and were therefore a bit hard to see in a somewhat crowded museum.

All in all a good show, but not a great one. Still, as it is HCB, it's worth a visit.
 
I'm going to see it soon, the catalog arrived yesterday. There are a lot of new shots in there and the essay by Peter Galassi looks great. As I also posted before, I was a little disappointed in his "Scrapbook" exhibit at the ICP three years ago, he is human after all. We are all so used to looking at his classics that it can be a shock when you realize that he was capable of taking ordinary pictures as well. In an interesting blog report by David Alan Harvey Josef Koudelka reveals that he's sure Cartier-Bresson would have never sanctioned the Scrapbook exhibit as it sullied his "place in history". As more and more of his work gets exhibited I don't doubt that many will be good but I think we have seen his best.
 
KenR said:
As I posted somewhere else on RFF, I was a bit disappointed in the show. Many of the prints were of such low contrast that I thought they were fading (MOMA thought that people would be disappointed with the quality of the prints so the first couple of panels are a review of different printing styles. They say he printed low contrst as that was the style in the 1930s.)
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You know, it's interesting that you mention that.

A few years ago I saw a large HCB exhibit and one thing that struck me was the odd quality of some of the prints. Not so much that they were sometimes very low contrast or out of focus, but they looked muddy, chalky or had blown highlights. Sometimes they looked as if they had been coaxed from a very poorly exposed or developed negative.

I have read on several occasions that while HCB was a brilliant photographer, he may have been was one of the worst technicians around. Supposedly his negatives would sometimes be poorly exposed and the printer would have a nightmare of a time wringing a useable print from them.

Still, as a photographer he's hard to beat.

PS: I've been to a few Magnum related exhibits and galleries and to be honest I'm often surprised by the poor quality of some of the prints. Heck I know that even I could manage to sometimes make a better print, than some of those I've seen. I wonder why this is. My guess is that often these are vintage prints and since they were items for news or PR and never intended as exhibit prints, a huge amount of effort wasn't put in to them. But of course that isn't really the case with HCB...
 
Pierre Gassman. The name of the printer who made some of HCB's technique dogs (but great images) into pearls. He was absolutely brilliant. At the Scrapbook exhibit three years ago they had the famous cropped Derriere la Gare Saint-Lazare alongside the full-frame original and Gassman really did a good job with it. Those that have the Scrapbook catalog; you can see the two images side-by-side on pp. 86-87.
 
Harry Lime said:
PS: I've been to a few Magnum related exhibits and galleries and to be honest I'm often surprised by the poor quality of some of the prints. Heck I know that even I could manage to sometimes make a better print, than some of those I've seen. I wonder why this is. My guess is that often these are vintage prints and since they were items for news or PR and never intended as exhibit prints, a huge amount of effort wasn't put in to them. But of course that isn't really the case with HCB...
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Well, HCB and a lot of Magnum shooters did I what I did when I was working at a newspaper- you go out, shoot what you have, throw the film at the paper's darkroom tech (or put it in the mail or hand it to a courier, etc... no email back then), and then run out the door to shoot another story.

Also, remember, the darkroom tech is printing photos to be converted to screens for printing on newsprint or glossy stock, on a deadline. I wouldn't be surprised if only the barest minimum of fixing and washing was done to the prints, since once they were set in the page for the printers, no one really cared about them.

I'd be interested to hear from a lab tech and a press tech about how photos for press printing were processed. I never had time to really talk to the guy at the paper's lab about what he was doing.
 
Tony Ray-Jones was horrible technician as well. I read that his negatives were often terrible and the printer would do anything possible to bring the image out.

"Scrapbook exhibit three years ago they had the famous cropped Derriere la Gare Saint-Lazare alongside the full-frame original and Gassman really did a good job with it. Those that have the Scrapbook catalog; you can see the two images side-by-side on pp. 86-87"

HCB cropping??? Wasn't that sacrilege in his view?
 
kbg32 said:
HCB cropping??? Wasn't that sacrilege in his view?
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No, not at all. I remember several of his well-known frames being crops. I'd have to dig out a couple of books to provide citations and I'm too sick to do that right now, as it'd involve heavy lifting.

But, to his acolytes, yes. Cropping is forbidden! But hey, Jesus didn't say anything about buggering children, either, ya know? 😉
 
I was able to go a few days ago -- there are some lovely prints, but I agree that some are interesting for their lack of technical perfection (being my first time seeing HCB's prints). One that was particularly frantic in appearance was his classic view of the bicyclist at Hyeres -- you can really picture him whipping out his M3. For me, it didn't decrease the value of these prints and reinforced the importance of subject.
Glad I got to go. Got to reading afterwards about another subject of exhibition there (Marina Abramovic) -- some weird and wonderful stuff under her.
Cheers,
Jim
 
What's the camera in the photo of the crowd at deGaulle's visit to Munich? Three windows and a folder. Neat looking thing. I like the low contrast prints.
 
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