Photographs – book review.

If your library of photography books is to contain only a handful of tomes, then someting showcasing Bill Brandt’s work has to be on the short list.

Brandt may be one of the very few exceptions who proves that monochrome can be more powerful than color, for his is strictly a black and white vision of the world.

And what a vision it is. None of the work is derivative in any way, Frequently, the images are breathtakingly original. Whether it’s his landscapes, or gritty scenes of coal miners or fabulous distorted nudes (sadly there are too few of these here), the viewer looks on in wonder at how one man could have done so much that was new. New and, let it be quickly added, horribly good.

Who can forget his portrait of a troubled Peter Sellers, taken between scenes for one of the Pink Panther comedies? Or his haunting image of Francis Bacon on Primrose Hill. His picture of Sir Kenneth and Lady Clarke, the spouse looking up at her esteemed husband with awe and respect (both well deserved in Sir Kenneth’s case), is charming for its lack of nastiness, which would have been an easy and cheap shot in the lovely home occupied by the couple.

His landscapes are no less moving. See the shot of Skye with the gull’s nest in the foreground. An image that hints at the best the surrealists did. Then turn to ‘The Man Who Found Himself Alone in London’ taken in a 1947 smog, an affliction which London continued to suffer until the mid-1960s, when clear air laws finally allowed one to breathe easily. Timeless.

We are taught to adulate the landscapes of Ansel Adams which, by comparison, are little more than picture postcards, albeit ones snapped by a supremely competent darkroom technician.

Buy this, or any, book about Brandt and you will have one of the shining exemplars of the greatest photography of our time.

Henri Cartier-Bresson – Book review

The man couldn’t take a good color picture. His portrait pictures are, for the most part, eminently forgettable. His street pictures invariably use maximum depth of field and are without exception, humorless. He claimed to be a revolutionary while spending the last thirty years of his life in a multi-million dollar apartment on the Rue de Rivoli overlooking the Tuileries Gardens. He was a rabid self-publicist with over a dozen picture books to his name. And he did his best work over 70 years ago, mostly before 1934, though living into the 21st century.

But wait a minute.

The man jumping the puddle.

The blind boy feeling his way along the wall.

The kid on crutches.

The Gestapo informer.

The monocled man at the bull fight ring.

The Chinese eating from a rice bowl.

The eunuch.

The near-naked man at the wall in Russia.

The couple on the train.

The gored bull.

The French lunch on the banks of the Marne.

The behatted Orson Welles character in Spain against that wild wall of windows.

The beautiful couple in Los Angeles.

Giacometti on the Rue d’Alema in the pelting rain.

And on and on.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson will easily call to mind the images conjured up by these brief descriptions and it is just that which makes him such a great photographer. His work is memorable. Name another photographer where you can recall so many photographs.

Maybe what makes his very early work the best is the still fresh teachings of the cubist Andre Lhote. Maybe it was a clearer vision in a less cluttered world. Yet what is so amazing about these early pictures is that they were all taken on assignments during his years as a photojournalist. Amazing, because he chose to make beautifully composed and timed images where mere photographic records would have sufficed.

Traveling in then exotic lands like China and India, pretty much anything would have satisfied his editors. But he wanted to do better. Years later, famous and revered, he disclaimed his photojournalist roots and posed as an artist. Later still, he disavowed photography (an interesting negative marketing tactic which cleverly served to make his work all the more famous) while making some of the most banal sketches since the crayon was invented. None of that matters. His life’s work was done.

There is so much we can learn from him. In a digital age where photographers think nothing of banging off hundreds of pictures in the hope one comes out (interestingly a criticism George Bernard-Shaw leveled at early 35mm photographers, when likening them to the fish which lays many eggs trusting one would hatch) it gives you pause when you realize that his picture rate during the 1968 Paris riots, for example, was no more than four per hour. And you can bet his success rate was high.

What made it possible for him to make so many well timed and composed pictures? The invisibility of this gangly, raincoated man is well known. His visage beyond bland, it would be difficult to take note of this faceless man in the street. Recalling that he came to his medium with a well trained eye, what remains a wonder is the timing. Lhote may have taught him to see, but the skill of pre-visualization, knowing the precise moment when all those building blocks would fit just so, that was born not bred. Thus was the Decisive Moment created.

And if there is any quibble to be had with this magnificent book, whose reproductions are beyond reproach, it’s that none of Cartier-Bresson’s contact sheets are included. These bear out just how often he got it dead right, without any need to machine gun his Leica emulating the fish model.

So what of the post-war work? Well, he didn’t “get” America any more than Robert Frank ever did. The images from the New World are replete with overfed Texans, gun toting kids and put-upon blacks. Nowhere is the beauty of America and the boundless generosity of its people on view. But what do you expect? Cartier-Bresson was, after all, French and his great inherited wealth had passed from bourgeois to royal status once he became its inheritor. This gave him license, of course, to mock the nouveau riches, whence he came. Further, the more recent work had lost its edge. With occasional exceptions the acidity of vision is gone. The architectural, nay cubist, compositional sense is no more. Maybe he got bored. Maybe he was no longer hungry. Or maybe fame had done its damage.

No matter. He transformed photography as we know it and is the spiritual father to all photographers. And you can forget all the rot about printing the whole negative and nothing but the whole negative. First I don’t believe it. Second, who cares if the result is good?

As a one volume reprise of his seventy plus years of photography it would be hard to improve on this book, as long as you are prepared to discount the silly, uncritical, gushing essays and HCB’s frightful pencil and charcoal sketches. I use this book as an interesting litmus test at home. Leaving it open on the bar for all to see, I know immediately a guest’s sensibilities when he pauses and turns the pages. Now that is someone with a shared passion.

And just for laughs, depending on whether he got his first Leica in 1932 or 1933 (the text is confused on this) it may just be that that man jumping the puddle wasn’t even taken on a Leica at all. Ha! ha! ha!

The Monograph – book review.

Paris de Nuit, a collection of Brassai’s pictures published in 1933, remains one of those books of photographs that are essential to understanding the street photography school of the early twentieth century. There is none of the acidity of Cartier-Bresson or the remoteness of Kertesz. Rather, there is a feeling that the photographer is one with his subjects in a city he loves dearly.

This tome, The Monograph, published in 2000 by Bulfinch, has much content from that classic, all of it reproduced in deep toned, juicy monochrome. While technique is never an issue with Brassai, always being superb, the large scale of this book only emphasizes just how good he was, considering the great limitations of the equipment of his day. This is 1933, for goodness sake, and no, there were no 5 frames-per-second digital cameras with shake reducing lenses available.

Something new for me, gleaned from this book, is how many of Brassai’s pictures were crops of a larger negative. Sometimes one negative would result in two or three separate images. Shocking? Absolutely. Justifiable? Totally. If it’s good, what do you care whether the whole frame was printed (what a silly pretentious idea) or not?

And if you thought the perversions of San Francisco, or earlier, New York and London, were in some way original, you need only check this book to learn that there is nothing new under the sun.

Degas was a fine photographer given the limitations of the medium in his time. His paintings speak loudly of the photographic world to come. Many images here conjure up memories of Degas’s L’Absinthe and the lives of the down-and-outs of cafe society. Had Edgar Degas lived another thirty years, these are the pictures he would have taken. Brassai realized that vision. See it in this fine book.

Some of Irving Penn’s finest work.

Irving Penn is not just a great fashion photographer. Give him some spare time and off he goes on some personal project or other, frequently to the remotest places on earth, or the strangest. Like San Francisco.

This fine paperback shows pictures taken in his portable studio across the world, always by northern light. Published in 1974, it goes much further than August Sander’s cold, soulless work. Penn is vitally involved with, and sensitive to, his subjects, be they the mud people of New Guinea or Crete’s wizened old women.

If there are favorites then one has to be the group shot of Hell’s Angels with their women and machines, their leader looking like nothing so much as a Greek god. Then there are the Moroccan women so shrouded that only an eye protrudes.

I have been coming back to this book for some thirty years now and it never ceases to stimulate the senses and please the eye.

O. Winston Link’s masterpiece.

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Of all the books of railroad pictures you need know of only one. This one. Indeed, whenever photographs of breathtaking beauty are sought out, many in this book will be on the list of finalists regardless of subject.

Every picture in this book, all taken in the dying years of steam on the Norfolk and Western Railway of Virginia, is taken at night using flashbulbs, sometimes dozens at a time, using Link’s specially made apparatus.

Link shows that, to do something well, you have to be totally involved in, and in love with, your subject matter.

The composition, the insights into the last years of Norman Rockwell’s America, and the sheer love lavished on the work makes this book one of the very best picture books ever published, right up there with Cartier-Bresson’s ‘Decisive Moment’, though the subject matter could hardly be more different.

You don’t care about steam trains? No matter. If you care about drop dead, fabulous photography, you should have this book on your shelf.