Category Archives: Photography

Surrealism and the three pillars of Henri Cartier-Bresson

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This post is a first draft and will be gradually updated.

Henri Cartier-Bresson remains the photographer of the “decisive moment“. Apart from being influenced by the Cardinal de Retz decisive way of thinking, HCB also had 2 ohter pillars! After all, the tripod is regarded as the most stable structure…isn’t it? “Let’s no one ignorant of geometry enter her” was engraved at the door of Plato’s academy. As a former student of André Lhote, a renowned art teacher, HCB studied the classical rules of composition. By studying Cezanne’s and the other masters, HCB definitely internalized and developed some kind of 6th sense for geometry. As he said: “the golden ratio…it’s all in the eye…you know where it stands!!”. Well, to be honest, I do not have a compass pricked into my eye…and apart from dividing a frame into 3 equal parts, I do not really know where the golden ratio seats. The sad thing is that when asked about a way to learn geometry and composition, he smiled and answered: “Do you learn how to fuck?”….The eternal debate between inborn and acquired seems to be over!

Enough with composition, geometry and the things of life….The third pillar of HCB will linked us back to surrealism: “objective chance” . This theory was initially developed by André Breton. The father of surrealism regarded the world as populated and ultimately shaped by weak signals. HCB thought that you had to look at the world without willing. “You just have to be receptive…and then align the head, the eye and the heart”. “L’araignée d’amour” captured behind a door during a party in Mexico is a perfect example of such theory.

If Cartier-Bresson is “the eye of the century”, Brassaï was -as stated by his friend Henri Miller- ”the eye of Paris”. Will it be in the graffitis, strange faces engraved in the walls, or in the ethereal shots of the foggy nights, Brassai was really a surrealistic photographer. For him, the graffitis were part of the surreaslistic ”found objects”. Close to the spleen and “fallen angel” baudelerian theory, Brassai wanted to understand the ugly and dark sides of the world. Just like Diane Arbus, he photographed the weirdos in an attempt to understand life as a whole. Days, Nights, hidden messages, dreams, chance, mystery, aventure….All of these are part of Brassai pictures. Older than Cartier-Bresson, Brassai was actively involved in Surrealism journals and exhibits.

In 1925, while studying with Lhote, Cartier-Bresson regularly attended the Surrealists meeting at the Café de la Place Blanche. Cartier-Bresson was only 17 and belonged to a different generation than the founding members. With his friend the poet René Clevel, he sat at the end of the table and listened to Aragon and Breton. Feeling too young, he did not participate into the debates but adopted conceptions that would shape his entire life both as an artist but also as a human. Just like André Breton, the streets of the world were the stage of HCB.

It is assumed that Cartier-Bresson’s early work embeds a lot of surrealistic characteristics and symbols -ie: the mannequin-. Hard also not to think of the collages used by the surrealist painters when looking at “Les arènes de Valence”.

Henri Cartier-Bresson may not be regarded as a pure surrealist photographer but he definitely envisaged the word and photography in a surrealistic way.

I highly recommend the reading of the analysis of Adam Marelli about how Henri Cartier-Bresson’s approach was linked to the Surrealist Manifesto. www.adammarelliphoto.com

REFERENCES:

Houk Edwynn. Brassai: The eye of Paris. Houk Friedmman, 1993 : New York

Brassai: Paris la Nuit. Flammarion, 2001: Paris

Pierre Assouline. The eye of the century. Thames & Hudson, 2005

Anne Cartier Bresson et al. Revoir Henri Cartier-Bresson. Textuel, 2009: Paris

Graciela ITURBIDE – Who needs colors anyway ?

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Graciela ITURBIDE lives in an uncolored Mexico! Far from the endless beaches, the Mexico she looks at and shares with us is full of legends, dark birds, mysteries and amazing people wearing iguanas instead of hats! In a sense, Graciela ITURBIDE is not a  photographer, she is a rare breed of ethnophotographer. Her vision is razor-sharp, as sharp as the stings of the cactus she loves to capture with her Leica. Graciela ITURBIDE body of work is close to Diane ARBUS’s one. People are photographed as they are without any tricks. Her shots are not easy ones. It may be disturbing to look deeply into the well of reality. It may be scary but it is always fascinating. Graciela ITURBIDE is truly a fascinating photographer.

Digital vs. Analog Photography – The never ending story

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The baseline of this blog is  ”Talking about Photography…not about Cameras!”. That’s the truth! I do not want to open the door to technical debates about which is the best camera, the best lens, and so on….Great websites already exist to deal with these subjects. Somehow it seemed interesting to talk one more time about digital & analog photography. Is one really better that the other? Is the film grain much more beautiful to look at than the noise produced by a sensor when shooting at 2500 ISO? Are feelings and emotions carried only by Kodachrome, TriX or T-max films? This post will be subjective of course but do not hesitate to participate and to add your views about this always very controversial subject…

At first, let’s say a few words about the technical stuff and we will then be able to talk about real subjects. According to experts, when dealing with 24×36 mm films, the resolution of the Velvia 50 is around 16 megapixels, 10 megapixels for the Kodachrome 64 and 6 megapixels only for the famous T-max 100! So, the conclusion is the following: when using a good full frame digital camera, you will not be allowed to blame the resolution of your sensor if your pictures are soulless! What about the dynamic range? Well, it seems also to be an urban legend that says that digital cameras have less dynamic range than film ones. Anyhow, we now know how to optimize our shots dynamic range using the zone system. What about the noise/grain? Good question! Let’s compare! Below is a very simple example.


On the left side is the original picture shot Raw at 1 600 iso using a full frame sensor camera. I did nothing! I just converted it in B/W using Lightroom 3. On the right side is the same shot but I converted it to some kind of Fuji Neopan 1 600 iso look using DxO FilmPack 3. Is this picture awfully noisy/grainy. Well, I do not think so. Even if we have noise, there are now great softwares like Noise Ninja or Dfine to deal with it. Honestly, we are not shooting all day long in dark caves at 2 500 iso…so clearly for normal use, noise cannot be regarded anymore as an issue. On the other hand, you will tell me that analog shots are not noisy but grainy! Right! I agree….

So to summarize, in our 24×36 mm digital vs. analog comparison, do we have a technical winner?

- Resolution of the sensor: No

- Dynamic range: No

- Noise: No

In conclusion, regarding the technical stuff only, if we compare analog to full frame sensor, we do not have an obvious reason to favor analog to digital cameras. Of course, if we talk about medium or large format photography, things are different but most of us are using 24×36 mm format cameras. So the technical match is over!

Money is money so what about the price? Well, I have to admit that analog photography is expensive! Digital cameras are basically a one stop expense. Analog photography is a never-ending story. Interestingly, what I just said is not the complete truth! An analog camera can be kept for years! I still use my father’s Exakta 1967 camera! Digital photography is linked to the acceleration of our society. In Marketing, we do have the life cycle management theory dealing with the rate of obsolescence of new products. It is now mainly accepted that the life-cycles of products are shortening. It means that every 2 to 3 years we will buy a brand new digital camera! So, more or less, instead of paying for films and processing, the expenses will be linked to the camera renewal…What is also very clear is that to be a good photographer, we have to go beyond technique only. Changing camera every 2 years may not be the best way to shoot intuitively, especially if the back of the camera looks like a B-747 cockpit.

Time goes by. As I said, we are now living in an accelerating world. Digital photography is part of this process. With films, we had rolls of 36 exposures. When fully exposed, we had to slow down and reload the camera. With digital photography and cards, we have the ability to make thousands of shots. Each of my picture weights 17,5 Mo and I use a 32 Gb card. I have to say that I never think about the card. 

On the contrary, with my digital camera, I do not feel bad if I shoot the same scene 20, 30, 40 times in order to deal with small things….With film, it is really different! You know that the countdown is on. Interestingly, when shooting with film, the timeline seems to be different. I am much more careful about having a nice composition right from the start. I also take great care at defining a correct exposure. I know that I will not have the histogram to tell me right after pressing the shutter if the highlights are blown  ! Do you think that Brassai shot his wonderful pictures in a hurry?

 In fact,  Analog Photography is great for learning how to properly use a camera. Cartier-Bresson hated cropping. He thought that if the photography was properly composed right from the start, there was no reason to crop it afterwards. He was right and you will certainly agree with me that digital photography is prone to laziness. We know that we still have the ability to crop, reframe, correct the exposure and erase a couple of bugs afterwards! An analog camera and a tripod are definitely the best tools to use when learning photography. I am amazed to see that plastic toys cameras are now very fashionable ! That’s really cool!

I started photography in the 80s. At that time, I was used to buy film on a meter basis! I then spent my Saturdays in the basement filling the canisters. After shooting, I also developed my films and printed the pictures! When my friends played football, I was locked in the basement with a red light bulb on! I have to say that I liked that but nowadays I would definitely not do it again…The world is accelerating as I said. I really love films but I hate scanning them. Scanning is so boring! Talking about time, what was also really interesting with films was the fact that you could forget them for a while and get back to them after a couple of months. The shots are then seen with a brand new eye! Winogrand left behind him more than 300 000 shots unprocessed! This is more or less the lifetime production of 2 average photographers! Films are just like good wines you have to let them aged. Hard to do that with SD cards! I do not even talk about the need for multiple hard drives backup copies and cloud space.

Analog is fun, reliable….and doesn’t need batteries! What is true is that analog cameras do not necessarily need batteries! That’s really cool. We all have bad memories of a the picture of our lifetime that we missed because of the lack of an extra charged battery…we wanted to make and … too bad, out of battery! Another point is that we do not all have a tropicalised camera! With analog camera, we do not have to fear about the rain and the salt destroying the electronic components! The picture shows Henri Cartier-Bresson first Leica camera. I am confident that this beauty is still working!

Change is good. We all know someone who has a huge collection of old LPs and is convinced  that Elvis has to be listened on LPs only…that the sound of CDs is metallic…no need to even talk about MP3s! Somehow, change is good. What I think is that we have to try to conceal the best of the 2 worlds. We have to be realistic. Film is dead. It may be sad but it is true. Kodachrome for example is not produced anymore and even you still own thousands of rolls, there is no more chemical or laboratory to process them! Somehow, we do have a couple of interesting softwares to mimic the colors. The results may not be 100% right but at least it gives an interesting old fashion touch.


Beauty is asymmetrical. Digital cameras are technically great. Nowadays, you really have to want it not to correctly expose a picture. The problem is that beauty is asymmetrical and lies into defaults. Look at the pictures of the lady and ask yourself which one is the most attractive…the perfectly symmetrical ones or the normal looking and asymmetrical one?

Cameras are just tools and emotions are not conveyed by technical perfection. Once asked about photography, Peter Adams answered: “Photography is not about cameras, gadgets and gizmos. Photography is about photographers. A camera didn’t make a great picture any more than a typewriter wrote a great novel”. Hard not to be in complete agreement with this quote. Photography has to be fun and digital photography when used properly can definitely be as fun as analog. The point is just for the craftsman to find the tools that will best suit his art. As a conclusion, I would somehow say that unlike Kodachrome, I do not trust that someone will one day dedicates a song to sensors….

Zone System: Follow the KISS principle !

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When looking at one of Ansel Adams landscape pictures, it is difficult not to be fascinated by the tonality.

The white are white…the black are black…and in between we do have plenty of grays! In my previous post, I talked about instinct and said that according to the Zen principles, when taking a picture, we had to forget our brain, at least the left hemisphere, and let the eye intuitively composes the frame and defines the camera settings.

Ansel Adams’s Zone System appears to be the opposite of such intuitive approach. For him, a picture had to be properly composed and nearly scientifically exposed. The exception will prove the rules! So, let’s talk about the exception.

I have to admit that I spent quite some time on studying the Zone System. I read books, I read articles, I scratched my head, I watched videos, I used a spotmeter and a notebook to record the settings, I scratched my head again…and at the end, I realized two things. First, the Zone System is definitely an incredibly powerful tool, useful even for modern digital photographers, but also, that there were very few easily understandable articles about the Zone System! So let’s follow the famous Keep It Simple Stupid, KISS principle, and dive into the famous Zone System theory. My goal in this post is to separate the wheat from the chaff and to write the easily understandable method I would have loved to read instead of scratching my head… Do not hesitate to comment  and tell me if improvements can be made to improve the clarity of the post…

At first, let’s talk a little about the history of the Zone System. In the ancient times, photographers used films, some kind of gelatin stuff mixed with light-sensitive silver particles, and lightmeters. No AUTO mode during the glorious times of large format photography!.

More seriously, in the 40s Ansel Adams and his colleague Fred Archer were concerned by the difficulty to faithfully reproduce the reality they looked at and were willing to capture with their huge cameras. They were looking for a way to scientifically pre visualize a scene. As an example, let’s look at Ansel Adams’s snake river picture. He might have said: OK, I want the light behind the mountain to be really white, the trees in the front to be really black but I also want to preserve texture. How do I manage to record such different tonalities when I know that my meter will averaged everything in some kind of middle gray stuff. Yes! We know that a lightmeter is only recording middle grey. If under the same lightning we shot 3 pieces of paper: one pure black, one grey, one pure white- and use a lightmeter to define the settings of each individual paper, we will end up with 3 middle gray shots. Lightmeters record middle gray and middle gray only! This is key to understand. Unfortunately or hopefully, the world is far from being in middle gray only. The take home message is that we cannot trust our lightmeter and that we have to adapt the readings to what our eyes really see and to what our brain really wants to capture. Here comes the Zone System! Initially developed for films, it is easily transferable to digital sensors.

Basically, apart from the issue with the “gray” metering systems, the other limit photographers have to cope with is the limited dynamic range of the film/sensor when compared to the human eye. The dynamic range represents the scale of tonality from the darkest – regarded as pure black- to the brightest -regarded as pure white- in an image. When looking at a scene, the eye can dynamically adapt, grab parts of the pictures and let the brain recompose the image. The human eye dynamic range is assumed to exceed 24 f-stops! You will say that this is not fair game to compare a dynamic system, the eye, to a single static shot apparatus, the camera. We are not talking about HDR right! OK to be fair, let’s compare static eyes to static cameras and even then the dynamic range of the eye is anywhere between 10 to 14 f-stops ! What is the average dynamic range of a camera? Well, if we want to keep the details, let’s say around 5 stops! That a huge difference and it explains why we really have to concentrate on the metering in order to best reproduce what we see with our million years of evolution eyes.

Ansel Adams et al. brillant idea was to divide a scene into 11 zones, from pure white to pure black -from zone 0 to zone X-. What is also key to understand is that with digital cameras we only have 5 zones to deal with, so 5 stops!

Let’s assume that we want to make a picture of a snowy mountain. If we meter for the snow, we will of course get a middle gray -zone 5- exposure reading. But, we do not want the snow to be grey, we want it to be white -zone 7-. Between zones 5 and 7, we do have a 2 stops difference. If we then want to obtain a perfectly white snow and also preserve some texture, the trick is then to open up 2 stops and to add 2 stops to the metered reading.

Another example! Imagine that we are shooting Mephisto, our nice coal-black cat. Mephisto is black, right! We certainly do not want him to turn middle gray. We want his black fur to stay in zone 3 and not in zone 5. When compared to the snowy mountains, this is just the opposite. Instead of shooting for zone 5, we will close down the aperture 2 stops and Mephisto will turn black again.

It is really key to precisely metter the scene. Use an external spotmeter or the spot metering setting of your camera.

So to summarize, here is the Zone System checklist.

1. Select a portion of the scene to meter. For digital cameras, better to use the highlight part.

2. Decide where you want to place the selected portion according to the zones. Most of the time, use the most important part of the scene. For our snowy mountain example, the snow was in zone 7. Remember that when using a digital camera, highlight areas with details should be placed no higher than zone 7

3. Meter the selected portion.

4. Determine the final exposure by adjusting the aperture in regards to zone 5.

Of course, the easiest method to get full dynamic range is to bracket and to use an HDR software. We all know that HDR are not looking really natural…even if the realistic mode is selected. On the top of that, Zone System is so fun to practice and it is always much more gratifying to get a correctly exposed shot right from the start instead of wasting hours in postprocessing….

After the KISS Zone System, I will talk in another post about the use of the Zone System for color pictures and for complex scenes such as a black woman wearing a white dress and walking in a dark environment….Stay tuned!

REFERENCES:

- BARNBAUM B. (2010) The Art of Photography. Rockynood Ed.

- LONDON B, STONE J, UPTON J. (2011) Photography. Pearson Ed.

- BAIDA PE, BERTHOLDY P, CEGRETIN M. (1993) Le Zone Système. Les Cahiers de la photgraphie Ed.

- FREEMAN M. (2009) Michael Freeman’s Perfect Exposure. Pearson Ed.

- FRYE M. (2009) Digital Landscape Photography: In the footstep of Ansel Adams. The Ilex Press Ltd. Ed

- http://www.dolphin2001.net/photo/zone/index.html

- http://www.normankoren.com/zonesystem.html

- http://www.euristis.com/blocnote/article_zone_system_fr.htm

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Zen in the art of archery – The book Cartier-Bresson regarded as the ultimate photo one

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When Henri Cartier-Bresson initially read “The zen in the art of archery” written by the german philosopher Herrigel, he thought it was a book about photography !

He lately said that “Photography is just like archery…it is all about concentrating, targeting and shooting”. To see the true nature of things, one has “to align the eye with the heart”. No need for a brain to press the trigger at the decisive moment. By training again and again, the apprentice has to master the technical skills and to let instinct rules. For Cartier-Bresson, the camera was just like a modern sketch book and “the zen in the art of archery” was the only manual a photographer needed…apart from going often to the art museums of course. The ultimate goal is to develop an invisible link between the environment and the camera. The photographer will then become a medium through which the new perception ability he has developed by intense training will connect to the material world. Surrealist by nature, it is easy to imagine that this oriental form of automatism as a way to materialize the freudian super-reality might have been of great interest to Cartier-Bresson.  In his forewords to this book, Daisetz Suzuki says that “one has to go beyond technical skills in order to develop a true art with roots lying deeply into the unconscious”. To summarize, train…train again….and again until you reach the point where pictures will be unconsciously composed. Only then, the shots will be pleasing for the eye and not only for the brain…

Vivian MAIER – Living Unknown, Dying Famous

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Is Vivian Maier the new Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gary Winogrand or Diane Arbus? Well, maybe not…but she definitely is a Street Photographer and the new book edited by John Maloof is worth reading.

Living unknown…dying unknown and then, at last, becoming famous…this is the story of the life of Vivian Maier. During her all life she worked as a nanny, first in New-York, then in Chicago where she passed away in 2007. Vivian Maier was just like Mary Poppins! She had two lives. The first, the nanny one, was devoted to children and the second, the street photographer one, was devoted to her true passion -street photography-. She recorded the life of the rich and poor in their natural environment, the streets of Chicago! During 50 years, she captured simple moments of life, from the newspaper man sleeping gently over his magazines to the glowing white dress lady walking through the night. As a wizard, Vivian Maier locked all of this moments in boxes…plenty of boxes.

Her art was her secret garden and nobody was aware of her legacy. During auction sales, we all hope to buy an unknown Rembrandt or the negatives of Ansel Adams. John Maloof actually discovered the boxes of Vivian Maier. As a street photographer himself, he realized that these pictures deserved a global stage. He now devotes most of his time to organizing 50 years of  shooting. Vivian Maier body of work is definitely worth looking at. As a photographer, with her Rolleiflex around her neck, she precisely and patiently captured the daily life in Chicago during the 50-60′s. The Rolleiflex low point of view is different from the Leica higher one. Vivian Maier  looked at the world from a child perspective and it changes everything. Softness is everywhere. As a woman, she has a sharp but always gentle eye. Her portraits of children are exquisite and delicate. We are very far from the freaks recorded by Diane Arbus… Interestingly, Vivian Maier was also interested in abstract shots. The square format compositions are always perfect. For Vivian Maier who never smiles on her selfies, life may not have been easy but she was a true artist and deserved posthumous glory…Thanks to John Maloof for having revealed one of the few female street photographer of the century. This book has the flavor of old fashion lemon drops. One is not enough and we also want to pick some more! Thousands of rolls still remain unprocessed…and I like that.

Look at www.vivianmaier.com