HCB and Cropping

[John Robertson]

I picked up a book of some of his photos the other day. After some research I found out he never cropped anything.

My question; Did he have a perfect level built in his head or just avoid horizons most of the time? I notice that the shots I have seen would not have been improved by cropping, but did he throw away valid pictures because they were not perfectly cropped?

This is a valid question from someone that crops post shooting a lot.

A myth!
A number of years ago the Amateur Photographer magazine printed contact prints from some of his negatives, some of them were cropped quite heavily.
e.g. the shot of the man jumping the puddle at the Paris Rly station is only about 2/3 of the original. The shot of a mustachiod man looking through a hole in a fence is also cropped. These are the two I remember most, but there were many others.
I think latterly HCB encouraged this myth.
I got the feeling that the magazine was threatened with legal action by HCB (publishers?) because there has never been a repeat.


There is nothing wrong with cropping, what is wrong with laterly changing your mind about how a shot should be framed.
There seems to be some sort of snobbery by people who say they NEVER crop (oh really!!!) 🙄
Things which are inflexible usually snap!!

 

[Jaans]

Any post is important to those who posted it and those who read and replied. Certainly beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

What I was referring to is the importance of Cartier-Bresson cropping or not. His photos are what they are. How he got there by in camera composition, cropping while printing himself or directing someone else to crop while printing are not important to me. I view them as just a series of continuing artistic interpretations made along the way.

As Bresson is considered by many writers as the master of street photography, wouldn't it be common sense that there would be more than a few people here who maybe interested in the technical aspect of his work? This is a rangefinder forum after all and that was his chosen tool. More than a coincidence you could say.

A good photograph is derived from not only creative vision but also technique. So in a sense you are denying the relevance/importance of the second stage of the medium. Go figure.

 

[35mmdelux]

Further research would have revealed that the myths of his never cropping and never using other lenses are, indeed, myths.

Cheers,

R.

In various writings by HCB he states:
1) He liked the 90mm for landscapes.
2) In America he switched to the 35mm as his main lens.

 

[Benjamin]

Perhaps it's deemed unfortunate, but I truly believe in my own work, that a picture that requires cropping isn't worth printing.

Why be lazy?

 

[John Robertson]

Perhaps it's deemed unfortunate, but I truly believe in my own work, that a picture that requires cropping isn't worth printing.

Why be lazy?

Nothing whatsoever to do with laziness, as I said why be so inflexible?
Things which are usually break!!🙄

 

[Bob Michaels]

As Bresson is considered by many writers as the master of street photography, wouldn't it be common sense that there would be more than a few people here who maybe interested in the technical aspect of his work? This is a rangefinder forum after all and that was his chosen tool. More than a coincidence you could say. <snip>.

I have no problem if some have interest in the technical aspects of the way Cartier-Bresson worked. Unfortunately my choice of terse words implied that I did. That was my error.

My primary point should have been that Cartier-Bresson seemed to express very little interest in the technical aspects of photography. Therefore it seems unusual that some now do so specifically as it relates to his work. Personally, I wonder if people should delve into how he visualized those images we appreciate so much rather than how he went about it technically.

 

[le vrai rdu]

I deeply agree with that 🙂

 

[Jaans]

I have no problem if some have interest in the technical aspects of the way Cartier-Bresson worked. Unfortunately my choice of terse words implied that I did. That was my error.

My primary point should have been that Cartier-Bresson seemed to express very little interest in the technical aspects of photography. Therefore it seems unusual that some now do so specifically as it relates to his work. Personally, I wonder if people should delve into how he visualized those images we appreciate so much rather than how he went about it technically.

You have just raised an excellent point - I now understand your original opinion more fully.

I have often wondered about that point myself : how far would Bresson have progressed in the medium if he didn't have quality printers on hand to process and print his works? Would be have become such a large and predominant figure in the world of reportage street photography if he had to donate more of his time to the darkroom and less time to accruing the images on the street.

It would have been a difficult juggling act as he was gone for months at a time on assignments for magazines so without this support network it may have been more difficult to assign time to pounding the pavements in seach of photographs.

However, as I mentioned above in a previous post along with another poster he did print his early work and he subsequently obtained his first big exhibition in the States at the Julien Levy gallery with prints that he had done himself. That exhibition in many senses was the the one that rocketed him to early fame as he made it big on the other side of the Atlantic. So we must remember that the printing/technical side was done by him in the early stages of his career. So, it is anyones guess how far he would have gone if he had to concentrate on the technical aspect for the whole of his later career.

Remember that a lot of Magnum photographers do have their own printers as they to had limited time to chase stories. Also, it may come as no surprise but William Klein had his film processed by a local pharmacy for his ground breaking book New York. So, perhaps you could argue that in that genre of the medium third party help is part of the norm rather an exception.

Regardless all in all an excellent discussion>

 

[Turtle]

I do not see what not cropping achieves other than unnecessary compromise. If you are standing on a hill shooting down at a street scene and you have no physical ability to walk closer (or no time) what benefit is there of using an uncropped 50mm images when you really needed a 75mm lens. What does one do? carry every single FL with you? Throw out the ones where you needed a 40 rather than a 35 to exclude some intruding element? sometimes you cannot move sometimes you cannot exclude something while shooting from your chosen position What is impure about cropping? After all, a cropped image can represent nothing other than what would have occurred had you used a longer lens or smaller/altered format.

why should our vision be constrained by a camera? Why should I not crop to a panorama to make the viewer see certain relationships more clearly. Cameras don't dictate vision... IMHO the 'not cropping dogma' can (NOT that it has in this post) take the form another type of photographic elitism based upon a perverted concept of photographic purity, which ironically revolves around the arbitrary format of mechanical instrument rather than vision. The odd thing is that even LF aficionados like Michael Smith (of Michael and Paula) believe in it as some form of absolute.

As often is the case, comments by 'a great' become fashioned into a kind of law that bears little to no relation to the thoughts of the great to whom it was attributed. Why make the world fit a format rather than select the format that presents the world you wish to show? An important aspect to street photography is time. Things do not generally unfold at your convenience, which sometimes results in framing which is best adjusted. Why not? the scene is no less real because you straightened a wonky horizon in the neg to reflect the not wonky real horizon!?

 

[Chris101]

I have no idea about "HCB" not cropping. I don't crop (well, sometimes I do, but more often not) because I like the blobby, black border you get when you print the entire negative.

 

[Roger Hicks]

Perhaps it's deemed unfortunate, but I truly believe in my own work, that a picture that requires cropping isn't worth printing.

Why be lazy?

And I truly believe that in my own work, if a picture requires cropping, it's lazy not to do so.

This is one of those plus royalist que le roi arguments: more royalist than the king.

Ideally, all pictures should be so perfectly composed within the (arbitrary) shape of the frame that they do not need cropping. But as soon as you accept that the shape of the frame is arbitrary (35mm, 6x7cm, 4x5 inch are all different shapes), or that as Turtle says, the cropped 50mm shot that you get is better than the uncropped 90mm shot you miss because you're changing lenses, the limitations of the ideal become apparent.

Cheers,

R.

 

[250swb]

I'm sorry, but I think you guys are taking the word 'crop' way to literally in the case of HCB.

I tend to believe him when he says he didn't crop the image frame, because the image frame was composed in his head as he shot it, not dictated by lens, and not in the darkroom afterwards. He was a painter, and would compose in his head (pre-visualize) the image before taking out his paints. Likewise, and given the limitations of fixed focal length lenses, he would compose the photograph in his minds eye as he shot it, and if other things encroached into the frame that weren't part of the image he 'saw', then come the print, they are removed. That he enjoyed accidents and the limitations of vision caused by the imperfection of the medium shouldn't be confused with his main intent, to produce a harmonised image that says something.

I think you need to believe an artist by his or her intent, and it is the intent that makes or breaks a lifetimes work, proves or disproves the quality of it. But what I do think is laughable is taking literally a stance that requires a rigid view whereby images should never be cropped. HCB composed in his mind, not by the limits of the frame or focal length, that is what he means when using the words 'never crop', as an artist talking about photography, and not as a mythically pure photographer talking about darkroom technique .

Steve

 

[nhabedi]

There are some people here who seem to suggest that HCB was lying about cropping and his usage of lenses, but I think this is a bit unfair. I do think that - although he was obviously very important for the history of photography and although I like some of his early stuff very much - he is often overrated and he himself had the habit to exaggerate the importance of some details while at the same time being pretty lofty about other stuff.

I'm pretty sure, though, that he never claimed that he only used 50mm lenses. What he said numerous times was that he sometimes used 35mm and 90mm lenses (and probably others as well), but that the 50mm was his favorite and that he took the vast majority of his shots with it. I have no reason to doubt that. If others quoted him as saying that he never touched another lens, that's not his fault.

About cropping he actually actively tried to prevent people who published his photos from cropping them and made a big fuss about this. There are two photos he admitted were cropped for technical reasons - the "puddle" (because of the fence) and the cardinal (because he used a large format camera and held it over his head). Unless someone can actually prove that other photos published with his approval were also cropped, I tend to believe him. (FWIW, the bullfight photo mentioned in this thread was not cropped. He just took different shots and in recent years some of the alternatives which many people so far hadn't seen have been published.)

What is unfortunately true is that in some of the "official" HCB books from the 80s and 90s his publishers reproduced the two cropped shots mentioned above with fake negative edges like all the other photos. This can obviously be construed as fraud and I guess HCB had a look at these books before they were published. They shouldn't have done this (and in newer books they don't repeat this).

For me, what you can take home from his obsession about not cropping is that you should definitely try to compose the picture in your viewfinder and not in post production. I'd say you don't have to be anal about it and it's fine to crop one or two percent of a frame from time to time if there happen to be distracting objects. But if you're cropping a lot from almost every picture you're shooting, you should probably reconsider what you're doing.

 

[Turtle]

I have no idea about "HCB" not cropping. I don't crop (well, sometimes I do, but more often not) because I like the blobby, black border you get when you print the entire negative.

I think the above is a very good reason not to crop, as it is about vision. I can understand it, because it is presumably about the sense of completeness/factual reality that the black border provides. It is a statement of what took place within those borders and I like the use of such borders in some work. I occasionally do so, but more often than not, just have white borders. The alternative is a black key line which can be applied to a crop. It still helps create the same sense of completeness to the edge of the image.

It has been mentioned that cropping is somehow lazy for 'not having striven to get it right in camera' but I have an issue with this:

Most of what happens on the street rather than studio is unique. You cannot reshoot it. You can only do the best possible when you were there and so was it. The idea of going out 'to do again' a shot which was not 'right in the camera' is to go out to try to reshoot a particular image and surely this is the antithesis of street photography - the spontaneous, the unexpected, the way it happened at that place and time. It is a step towards the contrived.

To throw out or refuse to print images that would look better with a crop is to throw out those unique experiences, insights and fragment of reality. Those fragments are no less worthy because you were shooting 6x7 (whereas the shot would have been perfect on 6x6 at the same FL, allowing you to remove something from the edge of the 6x7 frame).

I see the goal of street photography to capture those unique moments/insights/perspectives and present them as they affected you.

I would ask those who regard cropping as lazy to explain why it is lazy, because I genuinely don't understand and have never really heard an explanation. I hear this argument a lot but don't get it and would like to try and get my head around it. Its as if not to have made the world fit your cameras format is somehow to have failed, but are we not there to capture what inspires us rather than to try to change it or only seek out what conforms to our parameters (let alone the shape of a box)? I also wonder what such street photographers would describe as their motivation and goal, because this of course has a bearing on everything.

 

[Roger Hicks]

I'm sorry, but I think you guys are taking the word 'crop' way to literally in the case of HCB.

I tend to believe him when he says he didn't crop the image frame, because the image frame was composed in his head as he shot it, not dictated by lens, and not in the darkroom afterwards. . . Steve

Dear Steve,

EVERYONE shoots what they see in their mind's eye, ignoring what is outside the composition which interests them. To do otherwise would be shooting at random and trying to find a picture in the negative afterwards.

To attribute unusual intent to HCB in this respect is therefore meaningless. Unusual talent, even genius, yes. Unusual intent, no.

Cheers,

R.

 

[Roger Hicks]

There are some people here who seem to suggest that HCB was lying about cropping and his usage of lenses . . . .

I don't think many have said that he was lying, just that some of his more overheated admirers have promulgated these myths.

It's also true that as a rich French kid who didn't have to make a living from photography, HCB himself was sometimes inclined to over-intellectualize and to exaggerate his intellectual position.

Cheers,

R.

 

[Carlsen Highway]

I love these chats about Henri Cartier Bresson; all kinds come out taking his word as sacrosanct law, followed immediately by the dismissive, the mildly contemptuous, and those that seemingly wilfully misunderstand.


What people should remember is that Henri lived to be very old.

And that he had been photographing things for many decades.

Perhaps consider that he did not think the same thing about photography in 1959 as he did in 1932, when he was only 24 years old.

Use of the 50mm lens - as another poster pointed out, it was his favourite. He did not dictate only the use of this focal length.

He insisted on not cropping his pictures, but I have only found rerference to this after WW2. But please bear in mind that he was a photo jurnalist and sold pictures to magazines. But his intentions are clear in all that he says - the picture is there when you press the button, or it should be.

I myself have always followed this, and when I have had to crop in an attempt to "save" a picture I have found it frustrating and annoying. It is a personlity thing I think.

People who dont like to crop, are the ones who feel that when they do they are fixing a mistake.

People who do crop regularly, may have made a part of thier working process perhaps.


But the implication that many make that Mr Cartier Bresson has been devious over the years and secretly cropping his photo's and using a 55mm lens, is well, a bit ridiculous.

Roger, on the other hand one could argue that Mr Cartier Bresson's intellectualism resulted in a particularly intellectual body of work.

I am not sure why you bring up the rich kid thing again, unless your buying into the whole Van Gogh myth thing...

 

[Roger Hicks]

Roger, on the other hand one could argue that Mr Cartier Bresson's intellectualism resulted in a particularly intellectual body of work.

I am not sure why you bring up the rich kid thing again, unless your buying into the whole Van Gogh myth thing...

No more intellectual than plenty of other excellent photographers who didn't buy into the 1930s need for 'movements' -- Margaret Bourke-White, for example.

Sorry, I'm not familiar with 'the whole Van Gogh myth thing'. The reason for bringing up 'French rich kid' (the 'French' is more important than the 'rich kid') is that the French do seem more fond than many of sweeping theories and intellectualizations that do not always relate much to anything, and that as a rich kid he could afford to indulge such a weakness.

Cheers,

Roger

 

[Carlsen Highway]

But everyone is a product of their own times; during the Thirties, being part of a movement was what one DID... Surrealism, communism, - intellectuals saving the world.
Cartier Bresson is not really dissimliar to a great many others - except the man could take a picture.

And having read what he has written - and listened to what I can find of him recorded or on documentaries, everything he has said makes perfect sense and hasnt seemed overly intellectual...(certainly not compared to any 24 year old art student defending a portfolio!)

I am curious, can you describe how he exaggerated his intellectual position?


(Margeret Bourke White? I am not sure I follow the association, in the 1930's these two inhabited different worlds entirely as far as I know, both personally and proffessionaly.)

 

[Roger Hicks]

But everyone is a product of their own times; during the Thirties, being part of a movement was what one DID... Surrealism, communism, - intellectuals saving the world.
Cartier Bresson is not really dissimliar to a great many others - except the man could take a picture.

And having read what he has written - and listened to what I can find of him recorded or on documentaries, everything he has said makes perfect sense and hasnt seemed overly intellectual...(certainly not compared to any 24 year old art student defending a portfolio!)

I am curious, can you describe how he exaggerated his intellectual position?


(Margeret Bourke White? I am not sure I follow the association, in the 1930's these two inhabited different worlds entirely as far as I know, both personally and proffessionaly.)

For the first para: exactly. He was a rich French kid of the 1930s.

For the second, I was referring to Margaret B-W's reportage; at least as intellectual as Henri C-B's. Or indeed Cecil Beaton's war pictures.

For the third, essentially the first again. If he had never said anything about his photography, it would not have mattered. I may have miscommunicated here: I did not mean that he exalted his status, merely that when pressed, he sometimes gave explanations that were unnecessarily over-intellectualized*. I cheerfully accept that as he grew older, he did that less and less. EDIT: Possiby because of the enthusiasm of his admirers, as noted in the last para below.

*And no, I can't give examples. This is from memory, but I find it hard to believe that I would have formed such an opinion groundlessly when reading his interviews, etc.

Like most great photographers (or great anyone/anything, really) some of his followers try to attribute to him more than he would ever have claimed for himself, and to put words into his mouth. Among others who have suffered from overenthusiastic acolytes, Ansel Adams, Christ and Marx come to mind.

Cheers,

R.