The memory lives on.
Henri Cartier-Bresson died in Paris ten years ago today.
His memory lives on.
Category Archives: Photographers
Henry Clarke
A master of style and class.
Seldom mentioned in a pantheon which includes such luminaries as Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, John Rawlings, Clifford Coffin, Cecil Beaton and Norman Parkinson, there’s a strong argument to be made that Henry Clarke was the master of them all when it came to sheer elegance in fashion photography around the middle of the last century.
Click the image for the Daily Mail article.
The Daily Mail recently ran an article on the iconic Vogue photographers and had the great good sense to include several of Clarke’s images, which you can see by clicking the picture. Scroll down and compare Clarke’s refined approach with the crass vulgarity of David Bailey. Of course, the New Look Dior dresses of Clarke’s time remain unsurpassed.
Robert Doisneau – Les Halles
All gone.
Robert Doisneau (1912-1994) (pronounced “Dwaano”) is the quintessential Parisian photographer. Where Cartier-Bresson emphasizes composition and the man in the landscape, Doisneau focuses almost exclusively on the people themselves. Doisneau’s intimacy is counterpoint to HC-B’s detachment. Both approaches work in the hands of these masters, but Doisneau’s is uniquely suited to the documentation of Les Halles, the produce market in central Paris which he photographed from 1933 through its demolition in 1971.
As Covent Garden in London and the Fulton Street Fish Market in New York were destroyed to make room for condos and stores that can be found in any other metropolis, so was Les Halles, with its exquisite cast iron frame designed by Baltard, consigned to the scrap heap. Doisneau’s record is priceless and irreplaceable.
Scalding Room, 1968.
The book contains over 120 images with an interesting prologue documenting the long history of Les Halles, and is highly recommended for all who love warm, involved candid photography. Very much a man of the people, Doisneau was clearly welcomed and loved by the people of Les Halles. There is nothing clandestine here as Doisneau was simply not that kind of phorographer.
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Bruno Barbey
Magnum photographer.
Bruno Barbey’s book ‘The Italians’ is a warm 1960s memento made up of his street images taken in Rome, Naples, Milan and Genoa. Though printed a little too dark for my taste, the images are those of a photographer who believes in getting in close to his subjects, invariably depicted with warmth and dignity. Barbey is a Frenchhman born in Morocco in 1941.
1964 – Piazza di Spagna, Rome.
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Richard Steinheimer
A photographer of trains.
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Being a train photographer means your output will immediately be subject to comparison with that of O. Winston Link in much the same way a street snapper’s work will be hauled up against that of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Neither is a winning proposition.
Regardless of genre preferences, any photographer’s library should include Link’s Steam, Steel and Stars and HC-B’s The Man, the Image and the World.
On those grounds, Richard Steinheimer’s book of fine railway photographs would not be your first choice but even if you care little for railroad photography, it deserves serious consideration.
Steinheimer (1929-2011) was up against it from the start as relatively little of his long career coincided with the age of steam. A steam locomotive makes the machine the star, regardless of setting. Link’s genius was to personalize it in the guise of the proud operators in the last days of steam he so magnificently photographed. (‘Documented’ would be a rare insult, indeed). Steinheimer’s work is more detached, more focused on the machine in its expansive settings in the west. People are not his forte. Link, by contrast, added that something special with his social awareness.
Steam appeals to the romantic in us but I can assure you that there was nothing romantic about traveling in a steam train. I took one from London to Dundee, aged eight in 1959, to visit my eldest sister, then a student at St. Andrew’s University. Forgetting to close the window as we entered a tunnel, I exited covered in soot and smelling like a linebacker after the Superbowl. There was nothing romantic about it, other than to a distant observer’s viewing the Flying Scotsman’s patrician progress through the beauty of Scotland’s countryside, a head of steam defining the machine’s progress.
You could also argue that taking pictures of steam trains is rather like photographing Angelina Jolie. Even your bad ones are going to look pretty good. On that basis, O. Winston Link is the Irving Penn of train photographers.
Steinheimer certainly added a special something to his images, generally incorporating the expanses of the great American west with outstanding compositional sense. The book is well printed, if not as well as the Link one and, unlike the latter, can still be found new and unblemished. Unsurprisingly, the cover picture is of a steam train ….