cd thacker Posted March 1, 2003 Share Posted March 1, 2003 Just picked up the March issue of <U>Vanity Fair</U>. This must be their unofficial gala photography number: inside are found a twenty- five page retrospective of the work of Annie Liebovitz; the last photos made by Herb Ritz - along with a short tribute to him; and - this is why I bought the magazine - an exclusive interview with Cartier-Bresson, featuring his portrait by Rene Buri, and a short selection of the standard HCB images.<P> In the interview (during which I would love to have been a French fly (complete with beret) on the wall) HCB, ninety-four years old, says a number of provocative things (of course). The one that caught my eye most was, "The only thing worthwhile in photography is geometry. Everything else is mere sentiment." (I'm probably paraphrasing, because I don't have the interview immediately at hand.)<P> This of course confirms what is starkly obvious in his work - that he is a strict formalist; no surprize there - but it does stand in stark contrast to the convention called, sometimes, "concerned photography", for which Magnum has been known (but which is probably better ascribed to Eugene Smith, and perhaps, though less directly, Edward Steichen).<P> My question is, how do you feel about his statement? Is photography primarily (or exclusively) about "geometry"? And should it be?<P> Please try to refrain from cheap shots at, or low vitriol toward, HCB - we know already he isn't adored by everyone. What I'm looking for here are your thoughtful ideas.<P> (By the way, I've scheduled myself for 16 and 18 hour workdays for the next three days, so I won't be spending much time here in the forum (though I will try to look in daily). It might be as late as wednesday before I jump back in with any substantive comments of my own.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lex_jenkins Posted March 1, 2003 Share Posted March 1, 2003 My own choice of subject matter usually reflects the principles described by Cartier-Bresson. Form is usually paramount. But I often wrestle against this in order to keep my mind open and my muse from fleeing to more receptive pastures. She is fickle and I must make concessions to appease her. Since returning to doing my own b&w processing last year I've experimented more with tonality as the primary element, with form and subject matter relegated to lesser considerations. It's not an easy task, since I still tend to work with recognizable forms as canvases on which to illustrate tonality.<div></div> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
markci Posted March 1, 2003 Share Posted March 1, 2003 I skimmed that article. I don't remember the quote exactly, though I don't think the word he used was "geometry." In any event, I think you're taking him too literally. This is the guy that complained about Adams and Weston shooting rocks while the world was falling apart during WWII, so his thoughts on the matter must be quite a bit more complicated than this out-of-context quote. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
david_kelly1 Posted March 1, 2003 Share Posted March 1, 2003 The quote is "The only joy in photography is geometry. All the rest is sentiment." It's used to caption his well-known shot of a man in a bullring with the sun turning one lens of his glasses into a disk which echoes a bullseye painted on the barrier through which he peers. In addition, the outer circle of the bulleye is continued perfectly by the man's lapel.All the other values in the shot are also strongly geometrical......... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ellis_vener_photography Posted March 1, 2003 Share Posted March 1, 2003 It's an approach that worked for H. C.B. <P>That doesn't mean it will or should work for everyone or anyone else. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cd thacker Posted March 2, 2003 Author Share Posted March 2, 2003 Thanks for the responses so far, guys. Let me clarify. I assumed that, when HCB used the term "geometry", he may indeed have been thinking of forms in their relation to one another; but he was using the word mainly as shorthand for "formal concerns" - ie, the formal concerns of art (or aesthetics) as opposed to overtly <I>social</I> concerns, or "human interest". This is akin, I think, to the premium sometimes placed on style or story-telling technique (again as opposed to social ideas or "human interest") in literature. I'm thinking here of Nabokov's take on Dickens - but you certainly don't need to be familiar with that to get the point. Social concerns or "human interest" vs. "geometry". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
david_kelly1 Posted March 2, 2003 Share Posted March 2, 2003 HCB frequently irritates (and enjoys irritating) people who have no formal art training, almost as if it were an unfair advantage to have spent two years at the Beaux Arts and two more with Andre Lhote. But afterwards he embraced, first Surrealism, and then Zen, both of which teach that formal rigor must be acquired only so that you can abandon it and act on instinct. Over and over he compares photography to sex: if you have to think about it, you'll never be any good at it. As for HCB not having been a "concerned" photographer: set aside his three escapes from the Nazi POW forced-labor camps and his work in the Resistance, and forget his sheltering and mentoring of many young refugee photographers, Koudelka being the best known. Like the rest of his first- generation Magnum colleagues he spent most of his post-WWII career covering revolutions and upheavals, doing some of his best work in China and India when conditions were at their worst. He always brought his highly individual sensibility along, though, and you won't catch him pouring "beauty sauce" on misery, the way Salgado does with his deliberate evocations of Old Master paintings. If history is a guide, HCB's reputation will take a nosedive after his death -it's already starting to happen, the rest of his gang are long gone and are being rediscovered! Then in a decade or so this deliberate troublemaker will be back, as annoying as ever, and kids will say "My god, this guy was good! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leslie_cheung Posted March 2, 2003 Share Posted March 2, 2003 i agree with what mr. kelly said above. i think hc-b is one of the best photographer because his photographs are BOTH of human interest and form...not to mention the decisive moment and full frame factor. hc-b is just playing the contrarian. i believe he mentioned in the article that conformity is a great evil. put him in a room of formalists and he'll play the sentimentalist position. get him a group of journalists and he'll be the artist. how do you think capa talked hc-b into photojournalism? as always, great thread doug Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chuck Posted March 2, 2003 Share Posted March 2, 2003 Disagree. sentimentality is underrated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chuck Posted March 2, 2003 Share Posted March 2, 2003 In fact, I would go so far as to say sentimental insight is the photography's reason for being, like transportation is auto industry's reason for being. Form and geometry are mere tack on features to serve narrow, dispensible needs needs, like certain cool features that serves car racing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gary_ferguson1 Posted March 2, 2003 Share Posted March 2, 2003 Which is the more difficult challenge for the photographer? To prick consciences and kick-start emotions, or to render the world aesthetically agreeable? Sentiment comes easy. Ask any successful pornographer, desperate charity fund raiser, or circulation hungry picture-editor. They'll all have a reliable cameraperson at their elbow. It's easy meat, we're easy prey. Give us the time proven photographic catalysts and we'll respond like the combustable, emotional creatures that we are. Aesthetically agreeable? Finding a pleasing geometry? Well that's a trickier proposition. Aesthetically the world's a mess, if it were otherwise then photography would be a breeze with every frame a keeper. Truncate and curtail and reduce an image until it makes the grade and you're left with banality, step back for the grand vista and the geometrical shortcomings cascade back like flotsam on a tide. HCB's a polemicist, he feeds journalists the sensational protein of controversy and they genuflect in return. Nothing wrong there, mortgages to be paid and reputations to be sustained, how could it be otherwise? But underneath it all the man has a point, leave aside for a moment what's worthwhile and ask what's difficult, do that and it's geometry that represents the higher peak. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
root Posted March 2, 2003 Share Posted March 2, 2003 Chuck, it sounds like you're saying that the subject is always more important than light or compostiiton. If that were true, then images of mundane subjects could never succeed, yet we take successful pictures of objects that the average person - and more than a few photographers - would walk right by. The secret is good lighting and 'geometry' . . . . . . and not necessarily in that order. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gary_watson Posted March 2, 2003 Share Posted March 2, 2003 Sounds like a "remembrance of mid-term exams past," Doug. Try looking at index magazine sometime. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
robert_m_johnson Posted March 2, 2003 Share Posted March 2, 2003 I think HCB once said something like, get the shot first, and then look for the geometry later! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leif_goodwin8 Posted March 2, 2003 Share Posted March 2, 2003 I think the quote is complete tosh and HCB knows it. Just because someone has a huge reputation doesn't mean they always talk sense. (Maybe he was doing a wind up?) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
david_kelly1 Posted March 2, 2003 Share Posted March 2, 2003 This thread was bolloxed at the outset by Doug's getting the quote wrong, and has gone downhill from there as people posted what they think they remember the poor guy said somewhere, maybe. "Joy" and "worthwhile" aren't even close and "sentiment" -which HCB does not call"mere"- does not equal our word "sentimentality." To a frenchman it can mean sensibility, feeling, or opinion, or all three similtaneously, but not usually with any implication of false or trivial. Cartier-Bresson never made a dichotomy between form and content in photography: "It is at one and the same time," he wrote in 1968, "the recognition of a fact in a fraction of a second and the rigorous arragement of the forms visually perceived which give to that fact expression and significance." Everybody who has been seriously involved in photography done outside the studio knows how difficult that is and how rarely it all comes together. When it does, damn straight it's a joy. As an old editor I think this forum would be a much better resource if folks would check half-remembered facts and quotes before posting them. It's pretty easy to do that now we have Google................. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ellis_vener_photography Posted March 2, 2003 Share Posted March 2, 2003 <I>'...I think this forum would be a much better resource if folks would check half-remembered facts and quotes before posting them. It's pretty easy to do that now we have Google................."</I><P>But David, where is the fun in that? m yfavorite rmark on these lines comes from musician Richard Thompson about his "fans": "They're worse than professional critics, they're amateur critics!" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lex_jenkins Posted March 2, 2003 Share Posted March 2, 2003 It is an interesting thread, but just affirms the essential nature of the observation (variously attributed to Frank Zappa and Elvis Costello) that writing about music (insert: photography) is like dancing about architecture. Worse, I'm certain the quote was stolen from someone else, lost to the mists of time, but Frank or Elvis were merely less stoned and remembered the quip the day after the party. No telling who HC-B actually cribbed his observation about geometry from. Someone more drunk, no doubt. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cd thacker Posted March 2, 2003 Author Share Posted March 2, 2003 David Kelly is correct, of course - we can usually count on him for that. I beg your pardon. <P> As you see, I've corrected the thread title. The actual quote is more interesting, in my view, than what I had. <P> My question, however, stands. What does the quote mean, do you think? Is it true? Should it be?<P> As for "half-remembered mid-terms past" - I'm not sure we ever arrive at the Final Exam. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
david_kelly1 Posted March 2, 2003 Share Posted March 2, 2003 Ellis is right: fact-checking is a drag, but bad information often takes on a life of its own and is incredibly persistant. Real people get replaced by media myths, etc. One "fact" I hope nobody checks, because I don't want to find out it's made up, is the best item in that VF interview, the bit where he gets Marilyn Monroe to "bless" his Leica by delicately squatting on it!............ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
h._p. Posted March 3, 2003 Share Posted March 3, 2003 'Please try to refrain from cheap shots at, or low vitriol toward, HCB ' Why not? it's always worth poking fun at people who've been put on pedestals. It makes the poker feel happier, the pokee more cautious and it might just make the onlookers re-evaluate their views. My own view of the man is that he's a first class self publicist, like many artists of his generation. He occasionally takes very interesting photographs and I'm properly in awe of anyone who gets to 94 with his marbles intact. But he's a man like any other and a fair target for chucking brickbats at. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lex_jenkins Posted March 3, 2003 Share Posted March 3, 2003 "...he's a first class self publicist..." Sounds like some photo.netters we all know and love. The wankers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cd thacker Posted March 8, 2003 Author Share Posted March 8, 2003 All right, I screwed up the quote; and that, apparently, screwed up the thread. I confess that I trusted this would be prevented by my saying at the outset, "I'm probably paraphrasing" - but perhaps these forums work less like conversation and more like written articles. In any case, I should have checked the quote or not posted it at all. (Then too, it's probably not a good idea to begin a forum discussion and immediately go off to work for a few days.)<P> Anyway, I was hoping we could explore the differences - without necessarily arriving at a conclusion - between the pure aesthetics - pure formalism - of, say, a Ralph Gibson, and the didactic preachiness of a Eugene Smith; and where we might locate HCB among them (perhaps somewhere in the middle).<P> Form and content can't be separated, of course - and fortunately they don't need to be, for the sake of this discussion. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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