For HBC Fans...

[wgerrard]

MOMA's chief curator discusses the legacy of Cartier Bresson here. Lots of pics.

 

[Turtle]

Great - thanks for posting!

 

[pachuco]

Very cool!! Thanks!

 

[Gregoryniss]

thanks for the link!

 

[Juan Valdenebro]

Thanks for that precious moment, wgerrard... I enjoy HCB a lot... Not so much when I was younger... My admiration for him grows and grows... Some time ago I feel my photographs empty if they don't have a human content... Feelings... With every shot I ask myself, does this deserve paper? Years ago I enjoyed the beauty of light, a landscape, interesting composition, unusual things, studio shots, creating on my frame as on a blank canvas, describing a city, artsy nudes or portraits, or spontaneous ones, but now I see photography as a different thing... It takes me a lot of time and hard work to get one or two shots... In the last months I've been out for hours and some days I come back without having pressed the shutter one single time... Sometimes I wonder if I'm wrong, I'm haunting, 'cause lately I believe photography is just what HCB or Frank or Winogrand said... Basically I feel more dependant... A few years ago I could walk around with confidence, and I used to see visual material I was able to transform on my shots: I thought my skills and my emotions about things were enough to create a valid image, to create beauty... Those days are over for me, sadly... Now I need other people to express myself... Sometimes other people's feelings, sometimes other people's track on things, but that feeling of being an artist or someone who's got inside all that's necessary to create, just vanished, and now I feel I was wrong in the past. Now what gives me pleasure and tranquility lays in another place, not inside me... I want to preserve other people's feelings, not mine...

 

[peter_n]

Thanks for the link Bill! I've also been to the exhibit and didn't notice any particular fuzziness. I didn't think the exhibit was particularly well laid-out but many of the prints were in excellent shape considering their age.

 

[andreios]

Thank you for sharing!
I understand what Juan is talking about - it was the same with me - I got utterly bored with shots "without life", without people. Nowadays I am in process of learning the basics of street photography - and although my results are not presentable yet, I enjoy even this at the moment almost fruit-less proces.

 

[wgerrard]

I suspect "it's out of focus" comments often come from people who are accustomed to seeing photos taken with fixed lens point and shoots with very large depths of field. I know that when someone unfamiliar with photography sees one of my photos shot with a narrow depth of field, they may react by asking how I got that "professional" look, but they are just as likely to ask "Why is the background out of focus?".

Photography, like anything else with pretensions to creating art, sometimes needs to choose between leveraging techniques that are appreciated by a smaller audience of cognoscenti or going after a broader audience. In the end, though, it's just a choice.

 

[wgerrard]

...those characteristics detract, and are distracting to me, and my assessment of the work involves those distractions.

I think that's important. When something in a photo distracts the viewer, then I think the photo doesn't work as it should. When we view images by recognized greats like Cartier-Bresson, it's easy to find fault in ourselves when we don't like a photo. But, more realistically, the photo just isn't as good as it might be.

I like some Cartier-Bresson photos, and I don't like other Cartier-Bresson photos. Many seem to me to have been hurriedly shot, which, given the nature of how he worked, is not surprising. But, that doesn't mean we should attribute planning and artistic intent to characteristics produced by being in a hurry. Luck, sometimes, perhaps.

 

[peter_n]

I was tremendously disappointed to find that one of my favorite of his images was just horrible in person. Printed very small, it's soft/blurry.

I had the same experience, the one taken in France in the early 1930 looking down from steps with the cyclist whizzing by underneath. It's pretty poor in print. I'd seen the Scrapbook exhibit three years ago at the ICP so I was prepared for a mix. The part that I didn't like were some of the sharpest prints there, the Communist and Capitalist ones or whatever the theme was. The pics from the NYC bank were shots that almost anybody given access could have taken, and the only two I liked from China were the blokes watching TV and the little girls dancing in the political parade. Not quite sure why Galassi chose to exhibit those, the magazine spreads would have been enough. One picture that I thought was stunning in print (hadn't seen it before) was the scrum at the bank in Shanghai. But it looked terrible in the magazine it was published in and doesn't particularly look good in the catalog either.

 

[Juan Valdenebro]

Focus wasn't that important to HCB... He said he used to shoot without focusing precisely -many times- if he couldn't do it for any reason. His well known shot of the man jumping over water with the ballet dancer behind jumping too, wasn't focused because he couldn't see while shooting: between two big objects in front of HCB there was a very thin space, just enough to place the front of the lens there, but having no vision through his viewfinder... He didn't want to photograph the man jumping... He says not only that shot was lucky, but every shot he did like in his life: if we look for a shot, we miss it, and only if we're receptive and try not to get it, luck will come every time giving us the shot, but for him photographs didn't depend that much on the photographer, or at least not in the way his decisive moment is generally understood. There's a decisive moment, but the photographer can't find it always, because it's not as simple as "one of the instants in time"...

Cheers,

Juan

 

[CK Dexter Haven]

This is the image i was so sad to see in person:
http://www.exhibitionsinternational.org/img/3829601492.jpg

This portrait of Camus, i've always liked in books/online, but didn't find that a real print enhanced anything for me:
http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kthdhmAHr21qzdd09o1_500.jpg

And, help me with this one, please. I've always SORTA liked this picture of Sartre, but the half-figure on the right bothers me. I don't see how anyone can consider it of compositional benefit. It seems more of a mistake to me, and i would have discarded the image for that alone. But, it's a photograph of an important figure, by an important photographer, so it stands.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DlOYtq-SH...00/jean-paul-sartre-henri-cartier-bresson.jpg

Thoughts?

 

[Juan Valdenebro]

It's Jean Pouillon, another philosopher, and very important for the portrait's composition, as with his presence the shot is not a pose by Sartre but a moment in the middle of two men sharing thoughts.

Cheers,

Juan

 

[Nando]

And, help me with this one, please. I've always SORTA liked this picture of Sartre, but the half-figure on the right bothers me. I don't see how anyone can consider it of compositional benefit. It seems more of a mistake to me, and i would have discarded the image for that alone. But, it's a photograph of an important figure, by an important photographer, so it stands.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DlOYtq-SH...00/jean-paul-sartre-henri-cartier-bresson.jpg

Thoughts?

The photo of Sartre is one of my favourites. Every element in the photograph lines up so perfectly including the figure on the right. In my opinion, a painter couldn't have planed the composition much better. And thats the thing that I like most about HC-B. He could take all the flux of everything around him and extract from it such beautifully composed images that could rival the most meticulously planned drawings and paintings. And he did this time and time again - more so than any other photographer that I'm aware of.

Here is the image again. I added the golden sections and diagonals.