tony_dummett

The answers above have confirmed my view about HC-B's technique: the reasons why he did what he did, in the way he did, are unsatisfactory, except to himself.

 

Lovely to hear from you Dennis and Lannie. I'll have one on both your "accounts" tonight.

The "HCB" method isn't the only way of making street photography. It's one way. I can understand some people get annoyed at its dogma. But it is a good discipline: shoot it how you want it at the time, or discard the neg.

Gare Saint-Lazare is also heavily dodged. I once saw two Kodak boxes full of HC-B 20x24 prints in the basement of the Bibliotheque Nationale. Apart from being obliged to wear gloves I could handle them as I pleased. They were full of scratches and splotches brushed out with photo-retouching pen. It made them seem more real and approachable to me. But none of them appeared cropped. I think perhaps some of his earlier shots may have been cropped, but as a rule he disdained this process.

 

I've often grappled with the reasons why printing full-frame was such an important part of HC-B's photography (and of many acolytes, including myself). I've never seen a satisfying explanation for the practise. It seems to be related to his other custom of printing his pictures with a full complement of highlights, grays and shadows, i.e. "realistically". What we're given is the scene exactly as the photographer saw it, concomitant with the constraints of frame shape and film parameters. There's a satisfaction in being able to use the camera as a window onto the scene in front of you, and not to alter it meaningfully afterwards. But just what that satisfaction is, is difficult to describe.

 

Partly it's a "gotcha!" sort of feeling, related to what I termed as a "knack" above. Partly it's the discipline of having to inter-react with the scene at the time of shooting. If you can do it, it's a way of proving to yourself that you understood what was going on, that your comprehension of the jumbled elements in front of you was accurate, plausible. There's a pleasure to be gained from being able to predict the actions, moods and arrangements of people in your scene, and to wait for them to come to harmony at the instant you press the shutter. Looked at this way, the resulting photograph is a trophy, proof that for a split second you were able to lock on to the world around you. The penalty for failure is to render the photograph inadmissable as evidence: by prohibiting cropping or significant tonal alteration we must (under HC-B's rules) discard the picture and try harder next time. Part skill, part psychology, part self-education.

 

See what I mean? The explanation is unsatisfying, if only because it begs the question: what's so special about understanding, about predicting what a bunch of strangers in front of you are about to do? Does the ability to do so make us better people?

 

Soon (if not already) it will be possible to continuously record - as a movie or video - a scene in high definition (i.e. 10 megapixels plus) comparable to 35mm film. I wonder whether it's good enough to shoot a few seconds in this manner, at 50 frames per second, and then go back at leisure and pick out the decisive moment from the video sequence? Would Cartier-Bresson have approved? Would being able to do this help develop our ability to understand our fellow man and the world around us? Would it hinder it?

 

Perhaps being restricted to one shot and one shot only, requiring skill and understanding to predict the exact instant when the shutter should be pressed, was a better way of doing things after all.

Erin, you pointed out the flaw in my question perfectly. I should have said, "I'm trying to think of other artists, <i>outside of popular culture</i>, whose death would garner such a universal reaction from general news organizations."

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(This is not to in any way deride Dylan, or any other popular artist).

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Cartier-Bresson's was not a household, everyday artist. He was known to photographers and aficianados. But not to the general public. That something as crass a Fox News should run an obituary is truly astounding to me. It supports my earlier point that, once exposed to his genius, I never found a person, "artistic" or not, who walked away unimpressed. Perhaps even the pinheads at Team Fox knew real talent when they saw it, for once in their programmed, Murdoch-infested lives.

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Henri Cartier-Bresson's subject was universal truth, life. And everyone appreciates truth when they see it, even the lie factory that is Fox News.

In one sequence of a film about his later life, he was with his daughter and his publisher going over proofs of a forthcoming retrospective. They were having a lot of trouble stopping him writing all over the prints, and in one case ripping a print out of the album. As they gently chided him, he began to smoulder and finally snapped at them verbally to stop patronising him.

 

In another interview he was deliberately obtuse talking about his photographic work and derided it at almost every opportunity, in deference to the purity of painting. While conceding that some of his pictures were quite good, he dismissed most of them, including the ones he liked, as trivial exercises.

 

My point was that having taken up painting again after a long hiatus he couldn't make them work for him, and his fans, in the same way his photographs worked. He was never recognized as "a painter", merely as someone who paints. My impression was that this made him frustrated and miserable, and I thought that was a shame, despite it being entirely his own business to decide what he liked and what he disliked.

 

It is worth noting that in all the reports of his death - even Fox News got on the bandwagon - not one of his paintings, his life's work for the past thirty years, was shown. I believe this would have been a source of some frustration to him.

 

Whoa..!

 

Fox News? Amazing! I'm trying to think of other artists whose death would garner such a universal reaction from general news organizations. And we thought HCB was our own private treasure.

Many see the French as "cheese-eating surrender monkies". The French are thinkers. We need thinkers. More than ever.

Christian, your English expresses your idea perfectly: it's all in the choosing, the selection.

 

I'm a bit choked up. I started off fairly prosaically, being factual about his life, his lost opportunities. Now after listening to reports on his passing on Australian radio, watching Australian television, reading the New York Times, CNN's website, this thread and many others I'm starting to realise what a loss his death has been. They have all carried the news, prominently.

 

Politics, disasters and celebrity lives have been put to one side. Iraq, Bush, Kerry and car bombs are secondary, at least on this day, to the death of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

 

I find myself gratified to say safely, that the World mourns his death tonight.

 

If only he had known. If only he had cared.

Yes, Brett, you're right about the universal appeal of Cartier-Bresson's photographs. I know of no person who has seen his work - artistic, worker, well educated or not, well grounded in the arts or not - who has not come away from a viewing other than uplifted.

 

And you're right about the simplicity of his images; or more accurately the apparent simplicity. There is an almost unbelieveable lightness in his vision, a mood that is always optimistic. Several witness to some of his most famous photographs have said he barely stopped, hardly turned his head when he took the picture. He perfected a technique of being able to technically record what his mind's eye saw - focussed, framed and correctly exposed - and to achieve this prolifically.

 

His technical prowess was aided by using forgiving black and white negative film that could be printed up or down a stop or two easily. It is said he pre-focussed his 50mm lenses to 4 metres and used depth of field to do the rest. That the flaws in the prints arising from this technique (and there are many, if you ever get a chance to look up close at originals) become invisible due to the overwhelming truthfulness of the image as a whole (I am speaking here of his published works, of course... he must have had many failures too) says a lot about the quality of his legacy.

 

In fact his technique was so good, that I've often wondered whether it wasn't just a knack involving quick reflexes and say, the right sized hands for the Leica camera he used. If it was a knack, does the trivialness of it detract from the images? I've never been able to answer that one. One of his most famous pictures, taken at the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris was taken through the gap between two fence palings, without him looking through the viewfinder (he admitted this with great glee in a recent documentary shown on Australian TV). Is it any less a near-perfect photograph for that? Or are we missing the point? Perhaps it is not the photograph but the vision that should be celebrated, the medium being almost trivial (except to those trying vainly to emulate his work).

 

And what particular "decisive moment" do we celebrate when viewing the image? A man about to jump into a puddle? Something that banal? Maybe that was Cartier-Bresson's final photographic triumph: he presented the banal in a compelling way, full of humor and cheek. Why is it that so many of the ikonic images of the 20th century are of such dramatic events (Capa's soldier, Burrows' Khe Sahn mud, the Hindenburg and so on), yet Cartier-Bresson's contributions to this gallery of greatness are almost entirely of everyday events, not at all "newsworthy", yet so universally appealing?

 

To add another level of paradox to the story, the old man was (not too strong a word at all) contemptuous of both his own photographic work and the reaction of others to it (especially after he retired from photography abut 30 years ago). To him, as Joris put it, it was because he was "naturally good at" seeing the world around him and couldn't figure out how so many were enchanted by something he found so easy to do. Coming from an affluent family he didn't need to earn a living in his younger years and had ample time to theorize about art and to meet famous artists: to become a member of an artistic clique in the Paris of the twenties and thirties. He could buy an expensive camera and travel widely, doing little but taking photographs. In those days the concept of a "snapshot" was a new one. Portability of equipment and high-speed miniature film were almost a novel combination. What we now regard as the artform of "street" or "decisive moment" photography was a blank page waiting to be written upon, to be defined. Just as Picasso could be said to have defined modern painting (to simplify art history greatly), Cartier-Bresson defined the new, portable art of peripatetic photography. It is a happy coincidence that both men (and there are other examples than these) not only founded their respective arts, but were their greatest exponents. And that it all took place in Paris.

 

I wonder whether this will ever happen again, such an amazing confluence of time, talent and place. Our manufactured heroes today kill, rob or lie for a living. They rarely do great works, other than of engineering or making money. Their so-called achievements are touted by paid publicity agents and political spin doctors. Cartier-Bresson's great success was garnered from a simple camera, carried around with him wherever he went. He eschewed sycophants. He kept his art direct, uncluttered and unsensational. I have often wondered whether he didn't see himself as a "junior" achiever, the forever present documenter of his great and talented acquaintances, but still basically a wallflower to their existence and their influence on the arts. And if so, whether that is why he came to loathe photography so much. Was it a reminder of what he may have seen as his secondary place in the artistic lives of his contemporaries?

 

Painting and drawing were his first and last loves. When he came back to painting in later life his renewed enthusiasm may have been a product of his wanting to be finally accepted by his contemporaries; the irony being that he had outlived them all. His photography, depending as it did on a knack for being able to record as well as see an event, may well have been - to him - too trivial a thing to concern himself over, except in jest.

 

He took the chance to reinvigorate the passions of his youth and found them as compelling as his memory recalled. That others did not seem to share his recommittment was the penalty for living too long.

 

Henri Cartier-Bresson was a miserable, cantankerous old so-and-so in his later years.

 

He had taken up painting and virtually disowned his photography as a trivial pursuit, in deference to painting. It's funny how his photographs were un-retouched, un-cropped and printed "flat" (and always printed by others). They were presented, without artifice, as a neutral window into the "real life" decisive moments he was photographing. It was the subject matter that was most important to him, shown without artistic effects in order to portray their essence. His photographs were really a representation of his eye's view on life and its many arrangements, rather than views in themselves that existed in their own right.

 

Then, going over to painting, he reversed all the realism in favour of impressionistic representation. In my view, he was always a much better photographer than painter. Yet, especially in his last quarter century, he wasn't all that interested in what people thought of his photography. In what he really wanted to do and be, he was ultimately a sad and lonely man, who believed his true voice was being ignored. That's why he became so cranky in his later years... in my opinion anyway, from viewing a couple of TV interviews he made in the past couple of years.

 

So many great artists - and people in general - do well what they couldn't care less about. And in what they want to do, they are only average. It's one of the great frustrations, isn't it? I think we could do worse than learn how to cope with our disappointments and make the best of them. To spend our lives in a state of chronic ire at our failings is such a waste of time.

 

Still, a great milestone. I don't call it a loss, as his work survives and will always inspire and instruct.

 

 

Most importantly, his creative agony is finally over.

Matthew,

 

I hate to say this, but if the scale is from 5 to 10 then the blitzers will give 5/5s instead of 10/10s. Think about it....

 

I really don't care too much if someone gives me a genuine very low rating. If they don't like a pic then good for them! It's the blitzers that pattern-rate who make the skin crawl (this goes for the 10/10ers as well - and yes, I have a few of THEM in my ratings lists, to my great embarassment).

 

I've also been "guilty" of irrationally rating pictures low in the past just because I don't like the genre or the subject matter. That's my prerogative, ain't it? I've also rated many pictures highly and the average aesthetics rating I dole out (according to the elves) is about 5 - near enough to average. Sometimes I'm in a bad mood and sometimes I'm in a good mood. Sometimes I'm just tired. Sometimes I don't look carefully enough at the details (because the thumbnails are so small). But that doesn't mean I'm a blitzer. The other raters will correct any mistakes I made with the Law of Averages.

 

But I've also posted the first or second rating on POWs a few times, well before they were adjudicated as such. So it's swings and roundabouts.

 

All this stuff about trawling for IP addresses, and publicly shaming people who rate low, freezing their ratings etc. is getting very totalitarian indeed. What do you guys want? Everyone gets a 10 and a teddy bear?

 

The thing that started all this was a few stupid blitzers who had a hack into the system because it was easy to do so. Photonet Conscience has identified a few (they stood out like dogs cojones anyway, but his analysis and defense of it was masterful). Many of these guys and gals have disappeared from the site or deleted their offending images. Good result!

 

If Mr. Conscience can do it, why can't the moderators of this site? (as noted above, they've tried, but the last attempt fell a little short on the math). The answer is of course they CAN, and I hope they do. But I vote against getting rid of the system altogether (do I, do WE even have a vote?).

 

One of the things I discovered from the ratings system was that B&W "street" shots are well-commented, but poorly rated. Color shots of pretty landscapes rate better, but excite more gushy comments (i.e. flattering but generally of lower analytical standards - not that I'm looking a gift horse in the mouth or anything ungrateful like that). Anti-B&Wism is a site-wide phenomenon - there certainly seems to be a bias against B&W candid photography. This is important if you're considering re-envigorating a career in professional photography. You have to know what "sells" (again, as proposed above). As a direct result of the ratings game I've consigned my B&W efforts to the "private use only fine art" domain of my photographic efforts. Disappointing personally, but pragmatic.

 

I see nothing wrong with subjective ratings or voting in general. If the voters are reasonably genuine then there's no problem. Most of the traps suggested above would slow the process down. There MUST be a way to eliminate the rogues as they're so easy to spot "manually". Surely some software whiz could do it without turning photo.net into Fort Apache, The Bronx or (worse) some kind of therapy page for sensitive souls or (the WORST) a photographic site where photographic appreciation is confined to only being allowed to say nice things about others' work. Sometimes a photographer needs a blunt and brutal kick in the ass to get him or her to realise they're on the wrong track. I've sure had a few and "thanks" for that whoever you are. It did me good.

 

LASTLY...

 

A section of the "Services Photonet" post that has received little or no discussion is the proposal for we photo.netters to provide private lists of blitzers. Surely they aren't serious? This is straight out of Stalin's text book. The elves should be able to detect these themselves without the use of anonymous "informants".

 

Goodnight all...

Vuk has noticed that the elves seem to have done away with all "1/1" ratings. True.

 

But they have failed to recalculate the resultant averages correctly, giving wrong numbers of ratings and then wrong results as the averages underneath the picture. The average rating for a particular picture seems to have remained unchanged (?).

 

Is this a plot? or just a bug?

 

And I agree with Mike Spinak... it's useful to know what kinds of pictures "sell". The Ratings System gives an inkling of this to those who are interested. Sometimes we're not the best judge of our own work. This assumes of course that it's "OK" to want your work to be judged. It's the old "Noble Artist Shivering In His Garret" vs. "Show Pony Who Goes to ALL The Openings" syndrome rearing its ugly head again. Some of us revel in the attention and others declare, "I vant to be alone". All I can say is, "it takes all kinds" and stopping the ratings smacks of puritanistic censorship.

 

Let us shallow, vain, deluded dilettantes have our fleeting moment of glory (and sometimes it's not so glorious either). You idealists out there (and above) can hack off your ears in disgust at our naiveity and do the hair-shirt and ashes hermit thing - no one's trying to stop YOU. Why should you try to stop US?

 

Reform the system (and fix the calculations while you do it) and get on with Life in the fast or slow lane - whatever takes your fancy.

Leave Mike alone, you...you...brute!

 

(Note: this has nothing to do with his "100%" endorsement of my own comments).

 

Cheers.

"Tony, ..., I think you need to think a little more carefully about the influence of "top-rated" status on your perceptions of the system. Being at or near the top of the pile ensures numerous ratings and, consequently, a lot less vulnerabilty to revenge raids."

 

I copped it the other week Tom (as did a lot of others) and dropped off the Big List screen for a while. When I was able to look at the ratings (a few days later) I saw patterned "1/1s" and patterned "10/10s" on most of my images. I have (and others have too) "friends" and "enemies" (although sometimes I think it's a case of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend") - respectively annoying and embarassing to me. My suggestions above in this thread included detecting and deleting these patterned ratings (good and bad).

 

A server-based photo.net filter to disable or delete these irrational "friends" and "enemies" would solve a lot of the current ratings system problems. If it's easy for my addled brain to intuitively detect false high and low ratings, why can't the Math PhDs at MIT do the same? (In fact I bet they already have mapped this out). To simply just abolish ALL high and low ratings ("patterned" and "genuine") because they're there smacks to me of censorship, totalitarian style. Get rid of them and we could then all live in a Wonderful World where all people are perfectly equal and get to talk about lenses and emulsions all day.

 

As to your comment re. unavoidable ratings, "It's all or nothing for posting viewable pictures", what's the problem here? If you don't care about ratings you could just ignore them. Anyway, the elves could sure fix this bug, couldn't they? After all, we're talking about future solutions here, as well as current problems.

Substituting a ten-level rating system with a tri or quad-level system would simply substitute "3/3s" or "4/4s" for "10/10s" and "BADs" for "1/1s".

 

The Ratings system has its benefits for those who participate (either as viewers or photographers) and does no harm to those who don't. It just needs reforming and tightening up.

 

I never read such a bunch of negative comments as some (many) of the above. Would you abolish democracy because it is abused? Or because you couldn't get into office? Or because you personally didn't want to be President or dog-catcher or whatever? Would you get rid of money because some people are poor and others rich? And the Professor wants to censor grades...as long as they don't come to me looking for a job, Prof, armed only with a touchy-feeley "narrative comment" and a new suit.

 

If you don't like the ratings system or the Big List, don't participate. If the site is being corrupted, elves, you should (and can) fix it... don't trash it because of the above photo.net Puritans (we call them "wowsers" in Australia).

 

BTW: a previous thread (about 2 weeks ago) suggested charging a small membership fee. Why not?

I thought someone had better kick-off a strong "pro-ratings" case, as most of it so far has been pretty "anti".

 

Call me "Wet" about this but the Ratings System has done a lot for my own photographic self-confidence since I started posting pictures in January after 25 years wondering if I was any good (or, "Did I make the right choice of a day job in 1980?"). It probably has done the same or similar for others. It's also made me a few good friends too (amazing the number of people you meet on the road in Europe who subscribe to photo.net... and when two people with cameras get talking in a taverna....). These are all positive things.

 

The "Drys", on the other hand, who would abolish the system, characterise anyone who participates in the ratings (and worse, succeeds in rating well) as ego driven, impure beings who do not subscribe to the lofty goals of "sharing" and "learning" and other such nice New Age concepts. Some of these above have even proposed that introducing pictures to the site ruined it! So let's get rid of JPEG posts and then we would have a photographic site (some say the best in the world) with NO PHOTOGRAPHS! Wouldn't that be a great idea?

 

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Reform the system.

 

One of the main ideas behind photography is to get others to actually see and appreciate real photographs ("Drys": please keep that foremost in your minds). We aren't all mired in the finer points of Dektol, Rodinal, T-grain emulsions, the such-and-such f2-point-whatsername lens as opposed to the OTHER f2-point-thingmybob lens, ENDLESS discussions as to why film is dead/alive and incident/reflected metering. We like others to see our pictures and we enjoy some (however inaccurate and prone to abuse) feedback as to how we're going. In my own case a lot of this feedback somes directly to me via email and, if it also involves matters technical, I always answer as accurately as possible. I also post a lot of technical stuff next to the photos. But I enjoy the appreciation too. What's wrong with that?

 

Where does all the "Dry" purist nonsense come from? Usually people who have not posted any of their own pictures, or if they have done so, rate averagely in The Big List. Does this mean they're not "sharing" their best with us, not "teaching" us how to achieve their lofty levels of expertise? Live and let live, "Drys".

 

As to a "comments only" forum: Comments are fine, but there are too many "wows" and "just superbs" etc. Don't really tell ya much, do they?... fairly inarticulate. Also, comments about photographs (and indeed about any visual art) remind me too much of Art School weekly assignments. Sometimes you can't say "why" you like a picture... you just like it and wish to give it a high numeric rating... or the reverse, of course. That method of appreciation should be allowed in parallel to commentary: photography's a visual medium. Writing about a photograph never substituted for looking at the real thing. If it did, we wouldn't take photographs, would we?

 

Some suggestions as to how to improve the ratings sytem:

 

1. Delete and prevent patterned ratings (all consistently "1/1" and "10/10" ratings would be a good start, especially from obvious bogus members). This does not include self-ratings as this is one way for the photographer to say what he/she thinks of their own work. If the system is abused, then only the photographer looks a fool.

 

2. Prevent more than one rating per set time period (say once per 30 seconds - then the blitzers would need to stay on line for a long time to wipe everybody out like "DA BombeR" did yesterday).

 

3. Up the limit of photographs for "Top Member" from 3 to 10, or maybe 20. It's too easy to score high with three flukes. The proper place for these photographs (they can hardly be called "portfolios") is in the traditional "highest rating photographs" filtered gallery.

 

And I agree with Vuk about Jo Voets - except for the "he" bit. She's a girl, Vuk.