Cartier-Bresson on "technique"

It just struck me that if RFF is having a contest inspired by Cartier-Bresson's photography, it would be useful for some words by Cartier-Bresson describing how he went about achieving his images.

To my mind, he is the embodiment of the stereotype of "aloof artist" as photographer -- quiet, patient, an observer rather than participant in the scene, to the point of not always showing much campassion for his subjects, though there were important exceptions. His style is in complete contrast to the stereotype news photographer who, unkempt and draped in cameras and motordrives, loudly pushes to the best spot to blast away at the action. I saw a television biography of Robert Capa a couple of years ago which included a long segment on his early years in Paris when he and Cartier-Bresson and Chim all hung out together in pre-Magnum days. There was a delightful segment in which they compared images from Capa and Cartier-Bresson when they covered the same event, some protest rally, I believe. Capa's photos showed a close-up of someone with bulged eyes yelling and sweating. Cartier-Bresson's photo showed a man with round eyeglasses peering through a hole in a fence on which was painted a large circle. Same event, very different photographers, very different images.
 
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VinceC said:
A "stinker" can be someone who is "crotchety, or unpleasant" as mentioned above. It's most often used to describe children who are being stubborn, annoying and displaying a bad mood. I think in modern American useage, stinker is nearly always said with a bit of a smile and tenderness toward the very young or the very old.
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Thanks, I think a got it translated, halfways at least. Difficult, those unspoken ground tones behind the idioms.

Don’t know if he was a stinker in the above mentioned sense, if he really was, then the above text of him surely does not prove it, just because it is of course 100% contrary to the POV of the most members here.

HCB was an exception so far that he found it worth while to speak about the “technical toy” phenomenon in photography.
For the very most pros it wasn’t ever and still isn’t an issue at all, it does not concern them.

bertram
 
taffer said:
But if we talk of Tag-Heuer, now that's a good photographer 😉
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I must take exception. Vacheron-Constantin. Or perhaps Piaget. Ulysse Nardin? Blancpain. Jaeger-LeCoultre, perhaps?

Would you believe a Hamilton and a baloney sammich?

Best Regards,

Bill Mattocks
 
Bertram2 said:
Don’t know if he was a stinker in the above mentioned sense, if he really was, then the above text of him surely does not prove it, just because it is of course 100% contrary to the POV of the most members here.

HCB was an exception so far that he found it worth while to speak about the “technical toy” phenomenon in photography.
For the very most pros it wasn’t ever and still isn’t an issue at all, it does not concern them.
Click to expand...
I'm thinking along the same lines. Besides, my definition of the expression "stinker" comes to me from Bugs Bunny. Yep. More of a likeable, mischievous wise-a** who can get away with anything.

Trop, vraiment, tellement perdu "dans" la traduction.
 
>>So, Vince: you say he wouldn't hang around RFF, present a huge quote of his, and go on "picking his brain". What is the conclusion?<<

I haven't got a conclusion. I just thought it was an interesting passage, on a word-based forum, from a master photographer who has inspired the latest RFF contest.
 
VinceC said:
... I saw a television biography of Robert Capa a couple of years ago which included a long segment on his early years in Paris when he and Cartier-Bresson and Chim all hung out together in pre-Magnum days. There was a delightful segment in which they compared images from Capa and Cartier-Bresson when they covered the same event, some protest rally, I believe. Capa's photos showed a close-up of someone with bulged eyes yelling and sweating. Cartier-Bresson's photo showed a man with round eyeglasses peering through a hole in a fence on which was painted a large circle. Same event, very different photographers, very different images.
Click to expand...


Vince, any ideas to the title of this biography or what network aired it? If I had TiVO I'd be all over it. Sounds fascinating.
 
bmattock said:
I must take exception. Vacheron-Constantin. Or perhaps Piaget. Ulysse Nardin? Blancpain. Jaeger-LeCoultre, perhaps?

Would you believe a Hamilton and a baloney sammich?

Best Regards,

Bill Mattocks
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Beautiful watches !

The idea I take from those words is that one should know the camera in such a way that it becomes transparent, no need to (almost) think on how to set it for capturing the images we see, thus being easier to concentrate on the seeing process itself.

Yet even if he wouldn't drop by RFF, that concept applies very well to the RF camera 🙂

And at the photo becoming what it is in the darkroom (or PS), well, I've found enough information to think on what was he willing to say...

http://www.f45.com/html/tech/techc.html

YET that's a technique in the end 🙄

Oscar
 
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Sbug,
I'm pretty sure the Capa special was part of the PBS American Masters series.
Here's the Link:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/capa_r_homepage.html
But my computer isn't pulling it up just now.



Taffer's observations on the camera becoming transparent to you were probably what I found most interesting about the passage I quoted.

I seem to be the "stinker" here because instead of discussing technique, a couple of my words have steered this thread toward looking for hidden meanings. I'm inclined to put the thread out of its misery and delete it soon, as BMattocks has started a parallel discussion on the decisive moment itself which gets more to the heart of the matter.
 
The film image seems to me overwhelmingly superior. The attitude is a combination of neurotic (envy) and money oriented. Faster=more profitable and, besides, what is customers' competence in image quality?
 
Vince, The link pulled up on my computer. Thanks!

I think that being so familiar with the camera that it becomes transparent is right on. It's one of the reasons I recently jettisoned a rf that I hadn't used for a few months. Simply one too many cameras to remember how to use efficiently.

I don't think there is any need to delete the thread. I have found it quite interesting.
 
Thanks for the link ! I remember reading the story about the 'confirmation' of that shot some time ago when I was browsing Capa's information on the net. Amazingly, there's still a group of journalism 'experts' who tell the photo to be posed.

Posed or not, I think the photo has enough power by itself (and even more after all these years), that if it's posed or not is no longer important. Or isn't Doisneau kiss a kiss ? 🙂
 
Pistach said:
Ok, nobody took a look at Another example. It is a double track, fairly interesting thread
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I looked at it (if you are referring to the Luminous Landscape link that is). No way I'm interested in that camera but then, I;m not interested in doing that type of photography. I can appreciate it though. To use a phrase Reichmann likes, Horses for Courses.
 
I my opinion what lacks here is an historical perspective. I remember an anectote of HCB passing near a gallery and seeing a panting of the impressionist Caillebotte and saying: who has stolen a photo of mine? Since I was a boy HBC was an hero of mine. And so are so many painters. Take any of them e.g. any impressionist. What the said is important, but in the first place as a complement of what the did (which is more important) and then both should be put in historical perspective. Thus I enjoy looking at its work (of HBC I mean), like I enjoy figurative art from Renaissance all the way to impressionism, but I don't ask myself if HCB or any other resuscitated artist of the past would bless RFF. Look at what HBC says of color. I suffered so much the transition to color that I was unable to go back to B&W for the rest of my life. As the proverb says: how much water has passed under the bridge?
Hope my opinion also sound comforting
Pistach
 
Quite true. It's always important to keep people in the historical context of their own time. When Cartier-Bresson was doing his most important work, color was very difficult to use ... ASA/ISO of 10 (!). Today we would almost certainly be shooting color and exploring its forms and patterms. In other threads, I've compared the original Leica to a high-quality digital point-and-shoot ... a very inconspicuous instrument that allowed photographers to quietly work almost unobserved while taking a large number of images compared to their roll-film predecessors ... and with much more depth of field than a larger format, which also allows one to concentrate on the entire scene, not elements within in. If Cartier-Bresson were 24 years old today, I can envision him doing very interesting work with a digital camera, similar to some of the war photographers in Iraq who stickwith advanced point-and-shoot models.

But of course Cartier-Bresson was a pioneer, helping to invent the way we understand small-camera photography, so you can't really fast-forward his life by 80 years. It's very possible that in today's environment he would have become a videographer or filmmaker. Or even stayed with painting, never experimenting with small cameras, because for him, they wouldn't have been "new" and "unexplired" the way they were back in the early 1930s.
 
But of course Cartier-Bresson was a pioneer, helping to invent the way we understand small-camera photography, so you can't really fast-forward his life by 80 years. It's very possible that in today's environment he would have become a videographer or filmmaker. Or even stayed with painting, never experimenting with small cameras, because for him, they wouldn't have been "new" and "unexplired" the way they were back in the early 1930s.
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Agree 100%, for decisive moment read “snap shot” for classic technique read innovating new technology and to him it was a profession not an art, I suspect it would be digital and colour but still be imagery of the first order, I’ve been looking back over his stuff and he had a excellent eye for the finished image
 
What really sucks is this lengthy discussion that went on a fourtnight ago about what focal length to use in the "HCB street photography contest", 50 or 35 mm.

In context with the quotation Vince has made in the beginning of this thread (which is also quoted in a book I bought at the HCB exhibition in August 2004, just at the time when HCB passed away at the age of 96) this discussion seems ridiculous to me.

If HCB had hung around in this webspace, he certainly would have had a clear and determined opinion - that "technique" is the action the photographer takes with his camera, preferrably at the right time (the event he smilingly compared to an orgasm in an interview, so much for the old school stinker!), and to recreate this spirit later on in the darkroom - nothing more, nothing less.

Jesko

______________

2006 AD
800 yrs Dresden
80 yrs Zeiss Ikon
 
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