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Category: Photography

Published June 20, 2013

Cartier-Bresson: “photographs are like a Chekhov short story”

On the New York Times Lens blog today there is first part of an interview with the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Conducted by journalist and filmmaker Sheila Turner-Seed in Cartier-Bresson’s Paris studio in 1971, the interview was apparently for a film-strip series on photographers produced for Scholastic:

I’m not interested in documenting. Documenting is extremely dull and I’m a very bad reporter. When I had an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, my friend, Robert Capa, told me, “Henri, be very careful. You must not have a label of a surrealist photographer. If you do, you won’t have an assignment and you’ll be like a hothouse plant. Do whatever you like, but the label should be ‘photojournalist.’ ”

All my training was surrealism. I still feel very close to the surrealists. But Capa was extremely sound. So I never mentioned surrealism. That’s my private affair. And what I want, what I’m looking for — that’s my business. Otherwise I never would have an assignment. Journalism is a way of noting — well, some journalists are wonderful writers and others are just putting facts one after the other. And facts are not interesting. It’s a point of view on facts which is important, and in photography it is the evocation. Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant story. They’re quick things and there’s a whole world in them.

By a strange coincidence I recently stumbled across a video of Cartier-Bresson talking about his work (via A Piece of Monologue I think). There appears to be at least some overlap between the film and Turner-Seed’s interview at the Times, so I assume it originated with her? (More knowledgeable people, please feel free to chime in!)

Sheila Turner-Seed’s daughter Rachel Seed (also a photographer) is working on a personal documentary about her mother called A Photographic Memory.You can donate to the project on Kickstarter.

(pictured above: Cartier-Bresson photographed by Dmitri Kessel)

Update: The second part of Sheila Turner-Seed’s interview with Cartier-Bresson is now available on the New York Times Lens blog.

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Published June 11, 2013

Garry Winogrand: The Photographer as Addict

Geoff Dyer reflects on the recent Garry Winogrand exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (or its catalogue, at least) at the London Review of Books:

The more you feed the Winogrand habit the more Winogrand you crave. Partly this is because of the sheer quantity of data amassed by Winogrand, the mind-blowing amount of information he provided about the social landscape of America in the 1960s and 1970s: suits, dresses, jackets, lapel widths, hairstyles, body shapes, faces, drinks, food, cigarettes, architecture, airports, pets, cars – everything. But it’s far more than the thoroughness and extent of this animate inventory that makes Winogrand so important. Taking his lead from Georg Lukács, George Steiner wrote of Balzac that when he ‘describes a hat, he does so because a man is wearing it.’ Granted, in photography hats are forever being verbed – worn, carried, tipped – but it’s helpful to see Winogrand as a visual novelist whose work was a sprawling human comedy. Or perhaps as a dance to the stilled music of photographic time, with a cast of thousands, that stood no chance of ever being completed. (Winogrand admired Norman Mailer, rivalled him in scope, energy, ambition – and in a disdain for any internal system of brakes. As it happens, he photographed Mailer at his fiftieth birthday party in 1973, on the receiving end of a finger-wagging lecture from a guest, so that the picture seems silently captioned by the Winograndian imperative: ‘Look!’)

Is there a word for something that is very much of Geoff Dyer? Dyerian? Geoffian? Anyway, this is that.

London Review of Books

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Published February 18, 2013

Finding Vivian Maier Documentary

The official trailer for a new documentary film about street photographer Vivian Maier:

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Published November 22, 2012

The Disappearance of Darkness

In this documentary short, Toronto-based photographer Robert Burley talks about his project documenting the demise of the photographic industry since 2005:

The photographs from the project are collected in the book The Disappearance of Darkness published by Princeton Architectural Press earlier this month.

(Note: Princeton Architectural Press are distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books)

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Published November 3, 2012

William Klein: In Pictures

In this interview for Tate Media, William Klein, one of the 20th century’s most important artists, photographers and film-makers, discusses his experience photographing on the streets of New York, the challenges of publishing his first book and how he working with filmmaker Federico Fellini:

Klein’s work is featured in the exhibition William Klein + Daido Moriyama at Tate Modern, 10 October 2012–20 January 2013. You can watch a Tate interview with Daido Moriyama here.

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Published August 24, 2012

TateShots: Bruce Davidson’s London

Bruce Davidson talks to TateShots about his photographs of London in the early Sixties, a series he undertook after photographing teenage gangs in Brooklyn:

The photographs are on display as part of the Another London exhibition at Tate Britain, until September 16th.

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Published May 17, 2012

TateShots Bruce Davidson’s Subway

“I wanted to transform the subway from its dark, degrading, and impersonal reality into images that open up our experience again to the colour, sensuality, and vitality of the individual souls that ride it each day.”

Photographer Bruce Davidson talked to TateShots about Subway, the groundbreaking series of portraits he began taking in the New York subway system in the spring of 1980:

The series was collected into a book published by Aperture in 1986, and the 25th anniversary edition of Subway was published last year. The New York Review of Books ran excerpt of the introduction to that new edition here.

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Published August 18, 2011

Don McCullin

Photojournalist Don McCullin is internationally renowned for his images of conflict. But a new exhibition of his photographs at Tate Britain focuses on three other aspects of his work: his first foreign assignment in divided Berlin in 1961; documentary work on homelessness in East London in the late 60s, and landscape works, both urban, and rural from the 1970s to the present day.

In this short interview, McCullin talks about the exhibition and his sadness a being known only as a war photographer:

 

If (like me) you are not able to visit the exhibition, a retrospective of McCullin’s work is available from Jonathan Cape, while his photographs of social deprivation are collected in the 2007 book In England. A selection of his war photographs, shown at The Imperial War Museum last year, can be seen in the exhibition catalogue Shaped by War.

(via Simon Armstrong)

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Published January 7, 2011

Finding Vivian Maier

Born in New York 1926, Vivian Maier was an American-French photographer who worked as a nanny in Chicago from the mid-1950’s to the 1990’s. In 2007, two years prior to Maier’s death, 26-year-old real estate agent John Maloof purchased a box filled with 30,000 negatives from an estate sale for $400. On discovering the quality of  beautiful street photography, Maloof then bought other boxes of Maier’s negatives in an attempt to find out more about the woman who took them:

An exhibition of Maier’s work opens at the Chicago Cultural Center today, and there is more on Maier and her photography here.

(via PetaPixel)

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