Cartier-Bresson on 6x6 TLRs

[robert blu]

I do not comment the HCB sentence, but I have a similar thinking when I see all the tourist with their digital cameras in one hand at the end of an extended arm pointing to their subject...why our eyes are not on our hands ?
rob

 

[Pherdinand]

It's much easier to hold stable a TLR hanging from your neck than holding a digital camera at arms' length, and i'd dare to say it's also more stable than holding a rangefinder in front of your face.
Come on guys. The TLR is a succesful design. With its limitations for sure, but the biggest limitation is always in ourselves.

 

[furcafe]

Didn't Cartier-Bresson use a VIDOM accessory finder to help w/his composition?

I too believe that HCB was probably doing a little send-up on his TLR-using friends. Most of my shooting is done with a 35mm RF; I even use my OM-1 more than my MF cameras. But for deliberate project work they are so much fun. I actually enjoy the constraint of the WLF on my Mamiya - the reversed image forces me to pay more attention to composition.

- John

 

[oftheherd]

I do not comment the HCB sentence, but I have a similar thinking when I see all the tourist with their digital cameras in one hand at the end of an extended arm pointing to their subject...why our eyes are not on our hands ?
rob

LOL. I like that.

 

[varjag]

Phillipp,

I also don't really "get" Cartier-Bresson, but that's another story. Or rather I consider him a fairly good photographer, but I don't get the degree of reverence with which people treat him.

It's like watching Броненосец Потемкин or Casablanca today. One may find them dull and filled with cinematography cliches, unless he realizes that those are the pieces that originated the cliches 🙂

 

[Marc-A.]

Phillipp,


It's like watching Броненосец Потемкин or Casablanca today. One may find them dull and filled with cinematography cliches, unless he realizes that those are the pieces that originated the cliches 🙂

You've got a point! I completely agree with you.

 

[tedwhite]

If their digital camera has an actual viewfinder I tell tourists to look through it instead of holding the camera at eye level. Oddly, many have never done that, and their reaction is almost always "Oh, my. I can see much better through it! Thank you so much."

Duh.

To me it looks as if the person is holding something smelly and distasteful at arm's length.

Which is what I'd do with something smelly and distasteful...

 

[oftheherd]

tedwhite,

I have only had two digital cameras. The first I made sure had a viewfinder, and commented a number of times how much I prefered using that. So when my daughters decided to get me another, they made sure it was one with a viewfinder. I just don't see the fascination of trying compose on an external screen. It is nice to look at the photo afterward to see if you got what you intended however. I agree with you that when watching others use that only, they seem awkward. I usually feel awkward.

 

[rxmd]

Hi Yevgeni,

It's like watching Броненосец Потемкин or Casablanca today. One may find them dull and filled with cinematography cliches, unless he realizes that those are the pieces that originated the cliches 🙂

If you look at it that way, you have a point. It's like reading the Gilgamesh epos to find all the literary techniques of narration already there. It must be great to be the author of such a piece, you get to be really the first to try out certain things 🙂

Then again, an approach that looks for the origins of things is easy to disappoint, because even Cartier-Bresson happens in a context and you can almost always find earlier examples for anything. (As a historian you get used to looking at an innovation and finding the precursors to it in even earlier innovations.) If I want to look at the roots of Cartier-Bresson's existentialist approach to photography, even then you have many of the elements of his style of photography already in Martin Munkácsi, who in his earlier photojournalism phase seems to have been hampered only by the lack of a Leica, or much of what was later to become the Magnum school of photojournalism already in the ethnographic photography of Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. Or if you want to cross into the realm of film, you can see much of what Bresson tried to achieve about "life caught unawares" already in Dziga Vertov's "Man with the Camera" (Человек с киноаппаратом/Людина з кіноаппаратом), and that in turn is informed by Ruttmann's "Symphony of the City" (Symphonie der Großstadt).

Philipp

 

[tedwhite]

Philipp:

You are obviously a learned and erudite gentleman. I never heard of most of the individuals to whom you refer, and I thank you for listing their names and their works.

I shall spend some time looking them up.

Regards,

Ted

 

[Michael I.]

I thoroughly enjoy HCB's work but remember he was a short man. My eye level view of the world, as a tall person, is always looking down -- a dull perspective.

Gene

As far as I remember seeing footage of HCB shoot he was visiblt taller then average.

 

[JoeV]

The two things I like about the TLR are: square format and waistlevel composing.

I'm a sucker for square format, and like to compose on a square viewscreen, as opposed to cropping a rectangular frame later. To me, the square is the photographic version of the perfect circle; nether preferentially biasing the image toward the horizontal or the vertical, and is ideal for abstraction.

As others have stated, the waistlevel composing lends an air of anonymity to one's street photography that is hard to experience with any other kind of camera. With a whisper-quiet leaf shutter up front, one can make an exposure undetected whilst standing virtually next to the subject.

The one thing that TLR cameras don't give you is the ability to anticipate the subject's movement, as one would in the area outside of the framelines of a rangefinder, so in this respect they remain reflex cameras at the core. Yet rangefinders themselves share another trait with SLR's that TLR's don't: having to put the camera up to your face to make an exposure.

As for HCB, his use of the Leica as an 'extension of his eye' wouldn't work with a TLR, since you have to glance down toward your shoes to see the image on the ground glass of a TLR, away from the subject entirely. It simply didn't fit into his working methodology, which was to see the composition coming together, prior to putting the camera up to his eye.

~Joe