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Henri Cartier-Bresson


andrew_viny

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Try to get hold of his books The Europeans and India, or a general collection -- well worth while. Cartier-Bresson is one of my favorites

as is Ansel Adams -- yet their technique and approach is wholly different.

 

Leica III of various versions followed by M3, usually always the 50 lens, occasionally 35.

 

Here is a quote from "The World's 10 Greatest Photographers," Popular Photography, May 1958: -

 

"Cartier-Bresson works exclusively with the Leica, together with lenses of "various nationalities." He prefers to use the 50-mm focal

length. He has a very low regard for accessories and gadgets of all kinds; he never uses a filter, and disdains exposure meters,

preferring to trust his experience and judgement. As to film, when weather and light are good, he chooses Ilford HP-3, rating it at 200

ASA; indoors and when conditions are poor, he uses Du Pont SX Pan, rated at 500 to 1,000 ASA. Cartier-Bresson trusts all his

processing to the lab of Pierre Gassman in Paris, which develops his film in Harvey's 777 (smetimes resorting to D-76 or Promicrol to

"push" film speeds). Printing is on Varigram or Ilford Multigrade, with recommended developers. Being free of gadgets, Cartier-Bresson

can carry his camera with him at all times, and this habit, together with his unerring skill in capturing "the decisive moment," is the key

to his way of working.

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While Man Ray and Brandt used the camera to photograph in-mind creations, Bresson seems to have let the world create

for him, with a great ability to recognize meaningful compositions.

 

Normally with only a 50mm lens on a quiet Leica body, he visually estimated exposures, positioned himself (very

discreetly), focussed and waited for the moment. His approach was quite non-technical and simple - a lesson for us all.

Everything had to do with composition and thoughtful analysis of the scene.

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HCB was indeed politically left of center and that's perhaps why he was allowed twice into the USSR in 1952 and

1972 with almost no restrictions where he could go. However, the pictures he took there no other photographer far

to the right him has ever taken. I've got his book documenting his 1972 trip. He clearly did his homework and knew

what he

was after. To my mind he had compassion for the people there and sarcasm, sometimes subtle, towards the

regime.

 

One picture shows a young party apparatchik leading a group of foreign students at a demonstration. His face is

stern and tense, his arms are spread out to keep the students in line. The students are carrying flags and banners

and clearly uncomfortable. All this is in stark contrast to supposedly festive setting.

 

Another one was taken of people going up and down the stairs leading to an underground subway station. There is

a crossection of Moscovites with tired gloomy faces and out-of-towners with bags and boxes of things they bought

that were only available in the capital. This is tougher to understand if one is not familiar with the USSR. I figure he

knew he could get this kind of a picture there, so he probably positioned himself and waited until all the ducks lined

up.

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Arthur Plumbton :

 

>> Normally with only a 50mm lens on a quiet Leica body, he visually estimated exposures, positioned himself (very discreetly), focussed and waited for the moment. His approach was quite non-technical and simple - a lesson for us all. Everything had to do with composition and thoughtful analysis of the scene. <<

 

Unfortunately this approach is notorious to have lead the Master into completely botch all the rolls he took in May 1968, in Paris during one of the largest demonstration he covered, by extreme overexposure...

 

Due to the (justified) fame of "Monsieur" Cartier-Bresson the lab promptly realized inter-negatives to allow printing of the otherwise inexploitable shots... Any less famous Free-Lance photographer bringing back such films to the Press Agency would have been kicked in the a..s and fired on the spot ! ...

 

Beside, Cartier-Bresson was lucky to live in a time black and white ruled... Such a mistake with Ektachrome (and perhaps in digital) would have been irretrievable.

 

Without disrespect for someone I consider nevertheless as one of the major 20th century photographer, this is another demonstration of what overconfidence and despise for the technique can lead.

 

It should also make some people here wonder what was the success ratio of the Master and if, despite his extreme ability to capture what he called the "decisive moment", there's not a large part of truth in what Brian Carter says in this thread :

 

>> Oh, his technique - sorry. Here goes:

1) Take a Lot of pictures. 2) Take more pictures.

3) Only show people the good ones. <<

 

I never met Cartier-Bresson in flesh, but I knew Doisneau personally and had a chance to see some contact printings of his films, and knew and was in contact of lesser known though very appreciated press photographers of the same generation... About 40% of the street spontaneous shots in the average have to be discarded under technical shortcomings (bad exposure or - and - bad focus), and at best only 33% in the average of a 36 exposure roll were both technically exploitable and significant. A result which was not bad in this era by the way.

 

I have no more direct access or connections with the present press photographers of a national or international level, but I would be curious to know what is their technical success ratio today and what is their significant and technically correct success ratio today on the same subjects while using cameras with the present advanced technology... I guess the final ratio of shots with both significance and good exposure and in focus might not be very superior (if you discard the duplicated ones due to the use of multiple exposures mode), but I'm sure the technically acceptable ones ratio have significantly increased.

 

Amateurs can still proceed like in the old times and live an enchanted life in the nostalgic photographers wonderland, but people living of their pictures and constantly confronted to the editing process of someone else cannot... Editors like to see a bunch of good pictures to chose from and knows what a professional can bring with today's technology for a specific event. They will forgive much less approximations than they did in Cartier-Bresson's time.

 

To praise the technique (?) of Cartier-Bresson as a lesson or an explanation of his obvious talent is simply marked with a total lack of realism.

 

Cartier-Bresson has an EYE few of us can compare with (if any)... With this talent he used what his era gave him as the best tool for his purpose and obtained probably the best possible results with this tool. Thinking using the same tool (and exposure technique) today will give you his talent is simply as meaningless as it ever was but it will be also a major mistake to believe anyone gifted in the same domain will - like Cartier-Bresson did - extract the maximum possible good shots ratio he would be able to obtain using a modern body instead.

 

The link between the man (or the woman) behind the camera and the camera is dual... It works both directions. The best photographer will certainly obtain good shots (artistically speaking) and be above the average even with a poor tool, but he (or she) won't extract the best possible result from this poor tool. Conversely a poor photographer won't be better with the best modern tool (artistically speaking) but, on the contrary to the old times, he or she will at least reach a correct technical level most of the time.

 

Consequently a good photographer, really freed by modern technology to concentrate on the subject will certainly be able to extract images which are really significant and almost technically perfect at the same time, even when the time factor forbid the use of refined and well thought technical adjustments...

 

The only technical lesson I think still valuable from Cartier-Bresson's work, is for me the futility to use zoom lenses and to a certain extent AF, zone focusing or hyperfocal use combined with a natural perspective prime (either a 50mm like him or even a 35mm) should better integrate the main subject in its environment and allow to obtain more life-like and meaningful candid shots. Although there is much more to extract from his approach of the subject, the way he framed his pictures and the choice of the subject he shot... Our world, dominated by the spectacular and the unusual (perhaps because we are a bit saturated with images ?) doesn't pay enough attention to the average human being around us, and I think it's a pity and the sign of the disappearance of a very important side of photography : the capacity to visually impact on our reflection about the human being as a whole, the world we live in and finally ourselves...

 

How many potential successors of Cartier-Bresson will remain unknown because of the lack of attention of the Press to the everyday life of ordinary people ?

 

FPW

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I think what HCB did is not repeatable in this current age. In his days the Leica is a very small camera and very few of his subjects would know he was holding a camera. People simply did not associate camera with a tiny thingy in your hands.

 

Nowadays, even a P&S screams "camera" to the average man in the street. And with the advent of the mobile phone/camera combination, city people are extremely sensitive to any person raising his arms in a picture-taking gesture. They no longer look at what you've got in your hands, they look at your body motion.

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Well I used a IIF with 50 elmar around bus lines for a couple of years in Toronto. This was year around. I photographed bus lines, people

waiting in line to get on buses, and people getting on buses. Through hundreds of exposures and thousands of people, I had only two

people ask me any kind of question. One young man who was art student recognized I was using a Leica, and he stopped to tell about his

camera. And another guy asked me who I was working for. Most people just ignored me, several can be seen in the prints looking at me.

One other guy said something one day when I was photographing a real long line with a Russian panoramic camera, he said someone

should be documenting the problem.

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Aside from the cameras used, which have already been discussed, I remember reading that Marc Riboud once said that when he joined Magnum he was encouraged by Cartier-Bresson to use a VIDOM finder. The purpose was to aid composition as the finder showed the image upside down. I've also been given this advice from painters and other well known photographers as well.
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Is it really true that the VIDOM shows the image upside down? I've never owned one, but I understood that they showed the image inverted laterally (left to right) only, and that this was corrected in the later VIOOH (Imarect).

 

Either way, HCB seems to have abandoned his own advice in later years - see portraits on the magnumphotos.com website or the Decisive Moment site linked by Jordan G above.

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Jonathan,

 

I haven't got my VIDOM to hand (so to speak..) but if I remember correctly, by turning the wheel on the back you can cause the image to appear upside down. I believe this is what HCB was referring to. I think Marc Riboud said he tried using it this way and took the image of the painter on the Eiffel tower with it - and nearly fell off doing so!

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John, thanks for your diplomacy! I'd forgotten all about that earlier thread, yet I see I even contributed a similar question to it, AND received the answer from Al Kaplan. I really must get a VIDOM to play with. I'm personally convinced that strong compositions remain striking in all inversions, though I still think that many work better right -handed than left-handed (or vice versa). I'm also convinced that if you want to concentrate on composition without being distracted by detail or human preoccupations, turning the work upside down helps immensely. So I buy the idea thus far. What I'm still puzzled about is HCB's apparent framing accuracy using what are (let's face it) quite crude and compromised viewfinders.

 

On another matter, it is nearly 40 years since I had a copy of The Decisive Moment in my hands (library copy - almost wish I'd stolen it!). The web site linked above brings the images to my screen much bigger than one gets in current books. Despite the loss of reproduction quality on the website, the familar images really jump out at me afresh at that size, especially the double-page spreads. I remember them having the same stunning impact at an HCB exhibition in London, where the print size was at least 16x12". Does anyone else notice a similar effect of image size, and can anyone explain it? I used to think it might be to do with spacing out the patches of tone, but given the poor quality of those web copies, that can't be right.

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Francios ... I enjoyed and concur with your analysis!

<br>

Going back to Nee Sung, I think the reason a P&S is visible today is because of how it is held and how long the process of taking a photo actually takes. Same for most other cameras with auto everything. Something like a D3 can overcome this with huge frame rates, lightening fast focus etc, but it's huge. For me most of the best candids I've captured were preconceived/pre-empted with a camera ready to go when the moment arrived. I can't compare my skills but certainly my enjoyment of getting home and seeing a plan come together full size/full colour is a very special part of photography for me. I think that's what I see in HCB's images. It's not translating 'what he means' as an artist, but something more straightforward and down to earth, what he was thinking and how he pulled it off.

Try a Ricoh GX1/200 with the video viewfinder on it and in snap focus mode, you feel like a pickpocket or street urchin of sorts.

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Nee Sung says:

 

"In his days the Leica is a very small camera and very few of his subjects would know he was holding a camera.

People simply did not associate camera with a tiny thingy in your hands."

 

I agree with this and can see the sense in it, and yet I was reading an interview from the 1950s with HCB last night in

which he discussed his earlier work. In the interview he stated that he was only able to take many of these pictures

because people were so used to lenses being around and thus ignored him.

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It seems that HC-B was not always a technical master of photography, but his perception of humanity and society and his

ability to frame such events in the 1 x 1.5 frame with clarity and panache was exceptional.

 

Pehaps his disdaining of the technical side of photography, such as exposure metering and darkroom enhancement of the

image, was a factor in his decision to reject the silver based image for the pleasures of drawing and painting, which he turned to later in

life.

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Henri, in all your (short) time as a member of this forum I have yet to see you make one constructive

contribution. Why bother...?

 

I think the point he is making that too many photographers are a wannabe Henri. They just want to dress like him,

talk like him, think like him,and most of all have the same cam.

 

Bliss is,hey, your photos are just like Henri's.

 

;)

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The thing I love about Henri was the philosophy he promoted. IMHO this was that always having a camera on hand and

taking lots of pictures is a good thing. I quite enjoy this school of thought. I myself carry an M2 or Leica II with me always

these days and find myself seeing frames lines appear in the open air as I walk down the street. :)

 

~Andrew

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Paul :

 

>> Going back to Nee Sung, I think the reason a P&S is visible today is because of how it is held and how long the process of taking a photo actually takes. <<

 

I do agree, these small things are neither designed nor truly adapted to street photography...

 

>> Same for most other cameras with auto everything. Something like a D3 can overcome this with huge frame rates, lightening fast focus etc, but it's huge. <<

 

At the same times HCB was using a Leica, a lot of "humanist photographers" of this era used the Rolleiflex, which is comparatively uge (I still have an 1960's F with an 80mm Planar f/2.8) but the Rollei allowed for a lot of tricks to fool the real subject... These techiniques were asposed at length in "The Rolleiflex Manual" by Marcel Natkin, another "Master" (but with a lower international reputation) of candid shots.

 

Frankly speaking, I don't think the unobtrusive nature of a Leica is as important as many believe to avoid premature detedtion by the subject. IMHO it serves mainly the photographer which can act faster and carry his camera more easily everywhere without being noticed as a photographer even before you begin to take pictures. The problem with SLR's is more linked with the noise which will invariably attract the attention of the subject, so the first shot must be the good one.

 

I don't advocate the D3 or any other big DSLR as the best suited tool for street photography either. A reason why I'm convinced there is a true usefulness for a modern full format DRF with modern exposure modes available, as this body will combine the best features of a modern DSLR and the best features of a traditional small format rangefinder camera.

 

However, from personal experience, I consider more likely to get a higher proportion of good exploitable street shots with something like a D3 (although using a manual focus lens set in hyperfocal instead of an AF zoom) than with any M camera (film or digital). To put the things otherwise, the cumbersome and noisy DSLR disadvantages will (IMHO) be more than compensated in terms of successful shot ratio when compared to the ratio of incorrectly exposed shots you are likely to obtain from an classic M camera.

 

>> For me most of the best candids I've captured were preconceived/pre-empted with a camera ready to go when the moment arrived. <<

 

It used to be the one and only solution to get the best shots... I don't consider AF to be reliable enough for street photography (as taking the time to adjust the AF points to the subject and re-frame is not the best guarantee to capture the "decisive moment") but as far as exposure is concerned, the best matrix metering allows for EXPLOITABLE (not perfect) shots form 95 to 98% of the time WITHOUT THE NEED TO RE-FRAME and the rest is easy to determine as needing another way of metering to be largely on the safe side. So, having set your manual lens in hyperfocal (or zone focusing) according to the subject you anticipate to capture and the aperture accordingly, you can actually use your camera as a point and shoot one instantly adn get you subject properly in focus and properly exposed (even if you need some post treatment to extract the best form your shot).

 

>> I can't compare my skills but certainly my enjoyment of getting home and seeing a plan come together full size/full colour is a very special part of photography for me. I think that's what I see in HCB's images. It's not translating 'what he means' as an artist, but something more straightforward and down to earth, what he was thinking and how he pulled it off. <<

 

I do agree.

 

>> Try a Ricoh GX1/200 with the video viewfinder on it and in snap focus mode, you feel like a pickpocket or street urchin of sorts. <<

 

Never tried such a camera myself... But I don't think you can reach the IQ of a more evolved though much bigger camera...

 

I am slowly selling all my silver halide photographic tools (regretfully my M mount lenses too for lack of a proper M mount digital body corresponding to my specs), only keeping my Rolleiflex more for sentimental reasons than anything else. But I'm eager to get the D700 I have chosen and experiment with its high ISO performance, expecting in so doing to go from available lighti into the new world of "available darkness"... Shooting candids in natural light in interiors, where nobody yet expects you to take pictures without a flash will certainly be a rewarding experience.

 

FPW

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FPW wrote: "<I>but as far as exposure is concerned, the best matrix metering allows for EXPLOITABLE (not perfect) shots form 95 to

98% of the time WITHOUT THE NEED TO RE-FRAME and the rest is easy to determine as needing another way of metering to be largely

on the safe side.</I>"

<P>

Francois, I'm curious why you consider hyperfocal focussing to be good enough yet you insist on matrix metering. In any random situation

the focus distance changes much more often and over a much broader range than light does. Could you not pre-set the exposure as well?

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