chikne
Well-known
ASCII? holy smoke you went the complicated route!!
Was HCB Really "All That"???
- Thread starter NickTrop
- Start date
- Latest activity Latest activity:
- Replies 189
- Views 22K
chikne
Well-known
Why have you deleted your post Mr Pitxu?
Last edited:
WoolenMammoth
Well-known
by proxy of having taken a ton of photos? uh, no. If you arent born with the talent to capture amazing moments, you certainly arent going to develop that through use. People get technically proficient through use, and often that developed technical proficiency tends to allow the poetic moments to flow with less friction, but taking one million photos does not unlock poetic prowess. You are born with it or you arent. If there was ever a time to realize this it is now, where most people have digital cameras and shoot 800 times what any photographer would have shot 15 years ago and all we have is 800 times the drivel.
Im not too sure you could make a more naive statement than that. Fishing actually is a really good comparison with photography. When I was a kid, I fished every day in my neighborhood after school, I probably went to the lake on more than 1000 occasions as a kid growing up. I was the guy in the neighborhood that NEVER caught a fish. Some people just do not have it...
Havent you met many wealthy people? Most people with a ton of money dont do much of anything. They pay people to fish for them. When most of the people I have worked with made incredible success and walked into million dollar incomes, thats when the personal assistants came into the picture, thats when they stopped doing many things for themselves and thats when their creative output really really really dropped off because they werent as hungry anymore, they had "made it". The only way to look at the rich guy who fishes every day is to applaud his drive to get up every day and repeat the mundane cycle of going to the lake and fishing.
The *ONLY* thing money buys you is time. And most people with it squander that time away being non productive. I simply do not understand the mindset for crucifying someone that CAN do something actually DOING something. Its really not a very sophisticated way to look at the world, where only the strugglers have the right for achievement, earned because of how hard they struggled. Simpleminded.
Make a list of all the uber wealthy that achieve great heights as artists. Its not a very long list. Most people make their money and stop achieving or the context of their achievements change intensely. If rich guy decides to dedicate his life to fishing and becomes the most awesome angler the world has ever seen, thats amazing. How dare you discredit the work that goes into that simply because the guy was able to do it?
Its damn arrogant of you to make the suggestion that your achievements are worth more because of your income than the achievements of someone in a higher economic bracket. If you are both amazing photographers, who cares? The pictures are amazing or they arent. Yeah, its a bummer you have a day job but if you cant take a good picture now, you arent going to do it with a seven figure income either. We are not talking about formula one racing here, or flying private jets or some other activity open basically to the wealthy elite only, this is a discussion about photography and the playing field is pretty damn level if you can muster up a few dollars for a camera.
Artists create good art because they are born into being a good artist. Money has nothing to do with anything here. And again, knocking a rich guy for being productive is about the most simpleminded jealous thing I can think of, where you really have to look at the wealthy artist and say "thank you for doing something" when they could have spent all of their days lounging in a pool, being served drinks doing absolutely *nothing* like most people in that world do (when it comes to creative output). Ive been there. Money ruins everything. But then you have some amazing artists with some cash and they have to take criticism for it. Its pretty boggling...
chikne
Well-known
Hmm, interesting.....
Ororaro
Well-known
Mammoth,
I'd prefer to be a millionaire then to be poor and have the "drive". Drive for what, success? Nobody succesful is poor... so there's something wrong with your analogy, IMO.
I'd prefer to be a millionaire then to be poor and have the "drive". Drive for what, success? Nobody succesful is poor... so there's something wrong with your analogy, IMO.
NickTrop
Veteran
Calm down. Yeesh. Read what I'm saying. I'm not bashing HCB or the rich. I'm only asking questions that pertain to HCB and lots of other artist who achieve "icon" status. Is it really that they're "all that", or is it some combination of talent and a confluence of other circumstantial issues without which they would not have achieved "icon status". And if it wasn't this "confluence of circumstantial issues" - being born wealthy which enabled him to roam around and talk lots of pictures; the era, medium, and equipment used - all those things I've outlines which are almost random accidents of birth, would the "icon status" have been achieved at all? Or, would his photos been forgotten along with him as they probably have been with lots of other forgotten photographers. How much is attributable to talent? How much is truly deserved? Do you legitimately like his work? Or is "HCB" a name you bat around and are only familiar with that pick of they guy in mid-air over the puddle? Are you being intellectually honest in your admiration? Or is it "other factors" - like there's certain names in various medium you're "expected" to be familiar and heap praise on because its sacrilege not to in that community.
As far as what I quoted by you, I never said or implied that. Period. I'm not "bashing" the rich (though I do think we should eat them.)
Al Patterson
Ferroequinologist
Nah, the rich will end up eating the poor. Think "Soylent Green".
There is someting to say for timing. If Bill Gates had finished school, we might be using a decendant of CP/M instead of Windows which grew out of MS/DOS.
Being rich did allow HCB plenty of time to hone his style without having to worry whether he was going to eat tomoorow. Being one of the first photographers in his genre certainly helped.
VinceC
Veteran
Recall something else Cartier-Bresson gave us ... He was a man confortable with money, who knew how to use it as a tool, and his business and money senses were crucial in setting up the Magnum photo cooperative. Certainly Magnum was the result of four strong-willed colleagues and friends working together (Cartier-Bresson, Capa, Chim and George Rodger) but each brought his own strength that ensured the idea succeeded where many similar schemes of artists tank.
VinceC
Veteran
There's also a myth that Cartier-Bresson was some lone wolf, stalking the streets in reclusive solitude. In the early-to-mid-1930s in Paris, he was close friends with Chim and Capa (two very poor artists who also scraped together enough money for Leicas and who, because of their poverty and youth, had no real personal commitments and so could spend all their time learning to photograph). Cartier-Bresson, Capa, and Chim spent a considerable amount of time photographing Paris together and critiquing each others work. It was Capa who urged Cartier-Bresson to do more photojournalism, to tell a narrative, rather than stick with abstract surrealism. And Cartier-Bresson has said that he was deeply influenced by Chim's humanity, sensitivity and artistry. And of course Capa and Chim were inluenced by Cartier-Bresson's sense of composition and his partience in waiting for the right moment to unfold.
I think that if these three had not met and spent countless hours together at Paris cafes in the early 1930s, there's a fair chance we would not have heard of any of them (or they individually would be as obscure as Chim -- David Seymor -- is today).
I think that if these three had not met and spent countless hours together at Paris cafes in the early 1930s, there's a fair chance we would not have heard of any of them (or they individually would be as obscure as Chim -- David Seymor -- is today).
NickTrop
Veteran
With you there, pal. A $3000 lens doesn't top the GSN, or the lenses on a fixed lens rangefinder. Only way I'd pay that is if a night with a few of Spitzer's babes came with the lens.
mfunnell
Shaken, so blurred
They seemed awfully overpriced to me. More evidence for Lord Kelvin's dictum? (Large increases in cost with questionable increases in performance can be tolerated only for race horses and fancy women.)
...Mike
Matthew Allen
Well-known
Gabriel M.A.
My Red Dot Glows For You
Tell that to Oscar Wilde.
Al Patterson
Ferroequinologist
Yeah, $3,000 buys a lot of GSNs and $250 hookers...
(Note, I'm being sarcastic here, I am NOT advocating buying GSNs...)
Al Patterson
Ferroequinologist
There are famous artists who were poor (in a finacial sense) all their lives. They weren't considered successful until after they died.
NickTrop
Veteran
LOL - you have to be rich to be successful. Hilarious. With logic like that, you should apply for a political talk show on AM radio. Hey - not for nuffin but I was a helluva successful teacher back when I scraped by, without benefits, during my adjuncting days. Didn't make crap though.
Luis
Member
In this day and age when formaldehyde-preserved animals and dung-spattered pictures are presented as "art", even by reputable museums, NickTrop's annoyance with hype and propaganda is understandable. With Henri Cartier-Bresson, however, he really, really chose the wrong target. Even worse, if he had bothered to study his subject just a little, he could have spared himself--and us--his rhetorical questions, as these reveal a total ignorance of HCB's life and achievements, and indeed of photographic history. As other correspondents have noted, it's immaterial whether Cartier-Bresson was wealthy or not. He certainly did not "hook up with intellectuals" due to his family wealth, he belonged in this intellectual milieu because of his own intellectual quality. It is preposterous to say that his pictures have succeeded because "they're old black and white pics of a different time, a different culture, a different era". To quote from the International Center of Photography's Encyclopedia of Photography: "Cartier-Bresson's first photography exhibition was held at the Gallery Julien Levy in New York in 1932, and his first reportage appeared in France in Vu in the same year." I.e., his pictures were new then, when standards were much higher than now, they belonged to that time, culture and era, and they were exhibited and celebrated because of their quality, not because of their quaintness. He was also included by Beaumont Newhall in a photo exhibition at the MoMA in NYC in 1937, and again in 1946, this time solo. Somebody else among many others who recognized his talent was Lincoln Kirstein, another "rich kid" who sponsored Walker Evans, and who also brought the great choreographer, George Balanchine, to America. Even though wealthy, Kirstein was an extremely talented man himself and not the type to be impressed by any "halo effect". As for Cartier-Bresson himself, far from promoting himself as an artist, he said, in an interview that appeared in The New York Review of Books: "There are no more craftsmen. Now everybody is an 'artist.' What rubbish! Photography--it's an artisan's thing. You know, something physical." NickTrop is of course free to like HCB or not, but my advice to him would be, if you are tone deaf, do not bother to go to a Mozart concert, much less criticize the performance afterwards.
NickTrop
Veteran
LOL -I didn't criticize anyone. And I didn't say whether I liked his work or not, really. I just asked a few "Cavutos" (if you get the reference/joke), if you don't get the reference, replace it with the word "questions".
rolleistef
Well-known
What is important with Cartier-Bresson is neither whether he was good or bad, neither he printed his photos himself (which he did, he had a Leica enlarger that made a black framing around his photos).
He's important because he thought photography, and we much owe to himself for his theoretical work.
"He was rich, he didn't have anything to do". So what. Is that a crime to study art? (someone wade a mistake on Wiki, he was born in St-Rémy-les-Chevreuse, not Chanteloup-les-vignes, which isn't exactly the same train station).
Of course he shot thousands of rolls. But who didn't? Can the Photo of the Century be obtained just by taking one or two pictures at the same time?
Moreover, he was greatly influenced by the Surréaliste, with which he was closely linked (André Breton, Paul Eluard, Soupaud etc). His motto, "taking photos is linking both the eyes, the heart and the head" is an emanation of their work about subconscious.
And to finish, I think what's interesting with him is his work, that's all. If they made a Posthume Exhibition after the war, that meant he already was acknowledged as a great artist.
He's important because he thought photography, and we much owe to himself for his theoretical work.
"He was rich, he didn't have anything to do". So what. Is that a crime to study art? (someone wade a mistake on Wiki, he was born in St-Rémy-les-Chevreuse, not Chanteloup-les-vignes, which isn't exactly the same train station).
Of course he shot thousands of rolls. But who didn't? Can the Photo of the Century be obtained just by taking one or two pictures at the same time?
Moreover, he was greatly influenced by the Surréaliste, with which he was closely linked (André Breton, Paul Eluard, Soupaud etc). His motto, "taking photos is linking both the eyes, the heart and the head" is an emanation of their work about subconscious.
And to finish, I think what's interesting with him is his work, that's all. If they made a Posthume Exhibition after the war, that meant he already was acknowledged as a great artist.
rolleistef
Well-known
and the real aim of Mr Nick Trop may have not been to discuss if HCB was a great photographer or not but rather to debate about Him and bring more knowledge, go back to the basis, think about it.. That's called in French a stone in the pond and is a very common university practice, for example when there first were studies about the History of Women. Somebody also lately stated that Bach didn't wrote his famous Solo Cello Suites etc.
Was it the case? If not, the result is the same anyway.
Was it the case? If not, the result is the same anyway.
