I first saw HCB's photographs as a very young man living in Los Angeles in the fifties. I was terribly interested in photography and spent hours studying the work of people in my region. It was clear to me that this (HCB's work) was something entirely different than what I was accustomed to seeing, and I couldn't figure out how he did it, as I was armed at the time with a cumbersome and unwieldy fold-out camera with a little bellows.
Then I saw a picture of him with this tiny camera. His photographs had changed the way I thought about photography, and the strange camera piqued my curiosity. When I figured out what the camera was I recall going to a camera store in downtown L.A. and asking to see a Leica. If I had been drunk when I entered the store I would have emerged sober. As I recall, the price with lens was close to what I earned in a month. However, I was not so naive at the time to fall for the notion that if only I had a Leica, I, too, could take similar, and just as visually arresting, photographs.
What I found a recurrent motif in his work was what appears to be a carefully composed image with a human flitting through it (Torcello, Italy, 1953; Abruzzi, Italy, 1951; the bicyclist in Hyéres, 1932, etc.) It seemed that he composed the scene, then just waited.
But then there's a geometric tension about many of his photos that I can't really articulate. I was once turning the pages of a book of his photographs, and my teen-age daughter sat beside me. After we had finished, she said, "He took every photograph at just the right time, didn't he."
Ted
