Home » in English » Comments about our Editorial » Revisiting Street Photography
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| S [message #886 is a reply to message #110 ] |
Thu, 26 May 2005 14:10   |
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03:20am Jul 9, 2003
Dear Pedro,
Thank for bringing up two important issues in your last editorial. First, of course, the continued value of street photography. I do recommend South Asia as a region where the streets are open and the people welcoming. Raghu Rai's Calcutta work is an example of fantastic street photography in that region. Few have traversed the back alleys of Old Lahore with their cameras. It is a treasure trove.
The other, the myth of 'the decisive moment'. It is now an established fact that Henri Cartier-Bresson, the father of 'the decisive moment' concept, was meticulous and dogged when it came to finding his images. Hours were spent planning and executing his images. A recent article by John Banville's on Cartier-Bresson in New York Review of Books & Claude Cookman's study of his technique. Cartier-Bresson was worked hard to find and grab the pictures he had in mind. The myth of a moment that presents itself and is captured was retroactively created. Photographers, and companies like Leica, exploit this myth and continue to mislead students about what it takes to make great street photography. Its hard, hard work, and its intuitive as you point out and its also a lot about hours on your feet and luck. Steve McCurry can vouch for that.
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| Street Photography [message #887 is a reply to message #110 ] |
Thu, 26 May 2005 14:11 |
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04:07pm Jul 9, 2003
I did like your editorial very much and I hope street work gets its due. Street photography is such a complex concept. It's almost easier to define it by saying what it isn't (it isn't portraiture, but there are elements of portraits sometimes...It isn't landscape, but it often deals with space and light and atmosphere...It looks like documentary, but it's often more intimate and personal than strict documentation...it's isn't the nude, but I've seen some weird shit out there!).
I see street photography as being more of an attitude, a state of mind, rather than a location. I've been a street photographer for nearly 40 years and I've practiced it in all kinds of places, indoors as well as out, in cities and prairies and by the waters edge. The common element in all cases is an almost physical sense of time, an awareness of its immediacy as if it's breathing down my neck like the specter of death. I get into a kind of feeding frenzy and consume everything that appears within my line of sight. It's like breathless, desperate state of preparedness tempered by lust. When things start to happen there really isn't time to think about it or look at it. An intuitive set of responses over-ride logic, intellect and technique. Its erotic and neurotic and raw. What I love most about photography is that it allows you to keep up with this overwhelming sense of the present. Nothing makes me feel more alive than when I'm working my camera on the street. Nothing.
I think the reflexes that it takes to work the streets are primal, but the pace of the action is strictly late 20th century. We are modern. We can process vast amounts of visual data that would have made our parents dizzy. Street photographers look for the order that sometimes jumps out of the chaos and know that the confluence of random events that form the momentary, fleeting things we call photographs only happen because we see them. Heisenberg's 1927 "Uncertainty Principle" stated that the orbits of electrons do not exist in nature until we observe them. Street photographers look for the orbits of atoms. These are not accidents. We see things because we are prepared to see them.
And why when you go out with the same intentions of making good pictures each day do you come back empty handed on most of them?
Let me tell you a story of a friend of mine who was working on his doctoral dissertation at George Washington Univ. in Washington, DC back in 1978 when I was teaching at UDC.
Michael Silver was doing research in the field of cellular anatomy. His research was on the evolution of the neural fold in chicken embryos. The neural fold becomes the tube that encloses the central nervous system (stay with me here). In order to demonstrate the physical changes that take place during the gestation period he had to photograph them at each stage using a scanning electron microscope capable of magnifying things 80,000 times.
Each day several dozens of fertile eggs were delivered to his lab. Standing next to the stacks of egg pallets he looked like a short-order cook in a diner. Using a syringe, he pierced each egg, extracted albumen, squirted it onto a glass slide and looked at it under a standard microscope. If he was lucky enough to find anything at all he had to extract that piece of matter, place it on a stem, place the stem into a vacuum chamber and coat it with an ultra-thin layer of platinum, then put the coated stem into the SEM and scan it with beams of electrons. He would study the specimen on the TV monitor of the microscope, look to see if it were a chicken embryo, look for the neural fold, and then hope that the fold had evolved to the stage that he needed in order to demonstrate the cycle. Whew!
I couldn't help but wonder how often he found what he was looking for. "Oh, almost never", said Michael.
I was incredulous. "You mean to tell me that you go through this exercise day after day and rarely find what you are looking for?" "Right", said he. "But how can you stand it...how can you stand to fail so much of the time?" I asked, "doesn't it make you crazy and want to quit". I have never forgotten his answer.
He said, "Oh no, we don't consider them failures, Chip, we just think of them as sacrifices". And to this day, when I have gone for days on end looking for pictures on the street and come up empty, I think back to that conversation and remember that, no matter how well equipped you are, how smart you are, or how much skill you bring to the task, you have to be willing to sacrifice if you want to find what you are looking for.
Chip Simone
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| The Man Who Saved My Sanity [message #888 is a reply to message #110 ] |
Thu, 26 May 2005 14:14 |
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01:37pm Aug 5, 2003
This is a story, a very personal story, a very personal story about me. One never controls where one is born or to what parents, and seldom controls where one grows up. I happened to grow up in a small city in an area of flat land and seacoast. My parents were from poor families who lived in a large city. Thus, the appreciation of the possibilities of hiking, camping, and generally living with, and perhaps even photographing, nature, so much part of the lives of natives of the area, just were not in my culture. Instead I turned to reading, at which I was particularly good, and running, at which I was determined and enthusiastic, but particularly mediocre. Quite by accident, I became a serious photographer when I was relatively young. That is, I obtained a camera with adjustments, and learned how to use them. Now I knew enough about the science of photography to obtain eleven or so properly focused, reasonably exposed photographs per roll of twelve. How was I to learn about the art of photography? Things were rather dry. In high school, I chose all of the science and mathematics courses I could get because I knew I wanted to be a scientist. I shut myself out of art courses, thus depriving myself of understanding of a number of media, one of the few decent teachers in the school, and of the company of one of the most attractive young women in the school, decidedly a talented artist.
Where, then, was I to get instruction? Sources were few. For me there were a couple of photographic magazines, the artistic content of which was rather sparse. Still, suitable praise to the appropriate heroes was given. Ansel Adams, Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Karsh, Weegee, David Douglas Duncan (still my hero), were known to me. For some reason, probably a push from the media, the person I wanted to emulate was Henri Cartier-Bresson.
The Greatest Living Photographer. The Decisive Moment. I didn't understand those "decisive moment" photographs then and I don't now. Until just recently, when I happened across Pedro Meyer's Editorial "Revisiting Street Photography" I thought there was some serious deficiency in my vision. Mr. Meyer has said succinctly what I never had the courage to admit, even to myself:
"However, there is one major issue that I still have pending, and that is the notion of the 'decisive moment', the more I come up against it, the more convinced I am that we have to move on and understand that all the attributes that have been attached to the so called decisive moment are nothing but romantic notions pertaining more than anything to an era belonging to the birth of the 35 mm camera. The assumption that we can actually see all the elements within the frame of the so called 'decisive moment' is just a whole lot of nonsense. It does not serve well to educate photographers under such fictitious aspirations."
"This notion of the 'decisive moment' has also been one of those burdens that street photography has had to endure, hopefully we will also make some inroads into reconsidering the possibilities that ... photography can offer us to create the images that might otherwise have eluded us. Some have described the process as a 'magic' moment when all things come together without being seen. OK, I prefer a bit less magic, and a lot more reliance on my abilities to use the tools as I need them, rather as they see fit to work by themselves. Maybe the good thing is that today we have the options open for doing them both ways.
Thank you, Pedro Meyer.
This would be the place to philosophize, and as an (unofficial) Wise, and (official) Old Man, it is my right to do so. Nonetheless I shan't, other than to remind myself that each of us has her or his own talents, her or his own "vision", and that is what we are obligated to develop.
I end with a quote by (who else?) Henri Cartier-Bresson: "Photography appears to be an easy activity; in fact it is a varied and ambiguous process in which the only common denominator among its practitioners is in the instrument."
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| more streetphotography [message #890 is a reply to message #110 ] |
Thu, 26 May 2005 14:19 |
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[Updated on: Wed, 14 December 2005 21:42]
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Revisiting Street Photography
