let us now catalogue famous people

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/02/19/magazine/vivian-maier.html

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/a-lonely-gaze-on-the-times-and-its-city/

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/a-life-fashioning-art/

I picture plax opining on portraits when I look at these pictures

loved all of those. frank's woman in a taxi. his ability to work to photos featuring the new york times. the other lens piece on maier, too. i hope the retro on her gets into how photography fit in her life, to some degree, because it's so impossible to imagine, her technical proficiency and like presumably long-refined & thoughtful process, how she built those things. so good.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/120213_presidentsday-09_p465.jpg

seeing those Frank phots & remembering them, since, reminded me of how it's kinda annoying how good he is. like as much as it is awe-inspiring or inspirational or whatever. like just annoying.

lol I know the feeling

i was just scanning some photos i took at a thing for a friend, shot on ilford delta 3200, bc it was dark, & i think just the memory of the tones, the successful capture, of frank's stuff was haunting me. i said a thing here a couple of days ago about always having the workman-blame-his-tools out of 'well if only i had a leica/developed my prints', &c&c&c, & so there's some comfort there. i'd love to be 'on assignment'.

I mean there's that philip gefter book called 'photography after frank' and there's emmett gowin talking about how in his early days he was just trying to channel frank. I don't know why there seems to be a fracture in photography pre and post frank, and I'm sure you could find antecedents to his style (i.e. louis faurer). but for better or for worse it does seem all photography subsequent seems to lie, even obliquely, in his shadow.

yeah. i mean i found the emmet gowin idea really profound, and heartening, & it fits with the place that i think photos can have, now; there isn't necessarily this window with which to authoritatively just show, so much, & have it carry so much weight, per Frank's state-crawling nation-defining glut, but in stripping us of the duty or license to document we're also afforded this kinda indulgent, personal attention to ourselves - to edith gowin, to the girl who lived next door, etc, to the nyt photographer guy who goes back to japan for the funeral. the thing that compels me to un-sequence and scan and crop and resize and upload and add the imageshack url to the html of my internet thing is that those personal windows are really compelling, just as vicarious, transportive clutter.

so in this instance i think i was probably just talking more technically, because they're so measured:

http://ettagirl.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/picture-4.png

though i think some of it is staring at something slightly blurred, or something that inadequately renders someone you know, & knowing there's that accuracy in timing & gesture, as well as composition/tone:

http://meathaus.com/wp-content/uploads/robert-frank.jpg

gah http://www.kenschles.com/About/compare/NewYorkIs/NYIs.html

great mid-60s photos of the Hell's Angels
http://life.time.com/culture/never-seen-hells-angels-1965/?iid=lf%7Cmostpop#4

very reminiscent of Danny Lyon's Bikeriders series/book

http://www.adammarelliphoto.com/2011/09/henri-cartier-bresson/
HCB and composition

i like the idea that hcb was like the terminator, & when he glanced around his vision suddenly tinted & looked like this:

http://www.adammarelliphoto.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Henri-Cartier-Bresson-Likeness-003-Overlay.jpg

I've seen people analyze HCBs photographs as if they were just relations of geometric shapes on a spatial plane and it was just like ugghhh

oh, it's the one linked to

well, I'll just come out and say I don't agree w/ that viewing of HCB at all

It's not 'just' relations of shapes and lines - but composition can be the line between a photograph that merely imparts information and something more. The knock I'd have on the essay there is that some of the compositional claims are stretched a bit thin (like the one linked here).

HCB was very much a formalist and spoke of the supreme importance of lines/shapes/values in a lot of interviews.

"But this takes care only of a content of a picture. For me, content cannot be separated from form. By form, I mean a rigorous geometrical organization of interplay of surfaces, lines and values. It is in this organization alone, that our conceptions and emotions become concrete and communicable. In photography, visual organization can stem only from a developed instinct."
http://www.americansuburbx.com/2012/01/interview-henri-cartier-bresson-famous.html

yeah - I mean, HCB was def a painter by background. maybe that's why I'm not a big fan of HCB - and I keep on thinking of that frank quote re: hcb.

nothing against you milo - just that I feel like that kind of analysis is really mechanical. like...

Photographers, especially in their formative years, focus only on their subject. They forget all about the background. Since we cannot paint in supporting ideas, we need to watch for shapes in the background to echo our subject. Cartier-Bresson framed the image to include the spokes of a wagon wheel that mimic the ribs of a starving child and then he pairs it with the bony fingers of their malnourished mother.

feels like inappropriate analysis

it's a component, at least. doesn't mean it's the only component, or that that component alone is sufficient.
I like HCB but don't really like the cult of HCB. as discussed elsewhere I'm not in love with the emphasis on the 'moment' and the virtuosity and mystique, but something really works for me with a lot of his pictures. a significant part of that is the composition.

I do think the diagrams with the heads/spires, etc. are a little much though, since you can kinda play that game with most photographs. it's like in high school art classes where teachers take great pains to show you golden ratios in everything.

drawing that seashell shape over every damn painting in history...

I like HCB but don't really like the cult of HCB. as discussed elsewhere I'm not in love with the emphasis on the 'moment' and the virtuosity and mystique, but something really works for me with a lot of his pictures. a significant part of that is the composition.

― lou reed scott walker monks niagra (chinavision!), Tuesday, February 21, 2012 9:46 PM (37 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i'd agree with this

I understand why Frank thought of himself as oppositional to HCB's method, but I never thought it was necessary as I see them as different schools.

HCB is kind of a single-shot photographer - the power of his images is self-contained. His iconic photographs stand alone as prints on the wall, as paintings might.
Frank is more modern in the way he works in series - the power and brilliance of The Americans doesn't come from individual shots, but from experiencing the whole (as book or exhibition). (That, IMO, is a big part of what is meant when people talk about the existence of photography pre and post-Frank.)

I don't think that's strictly true - walker evans was just as a talented, if not more so, "series" photographer!

i think that while that's true of frank, that there's a great contextual power in the narrative & variety of his shots, he can still, imo, go toe-to-toe with anyone in terms of folding a huge amount into individual shots. & i think i could argue this even with his most 'specific', or 'mood' shots, which are so remote but resonate as archetypes, but if you didn't wanna do that you could just be like

http://metropolitician.blogs.com/scribblings_of_the_metrop/bus.jpg

LOOK IT'S AMERICA. i can understand that what is creating a singular image isn't the painterly quality, but how much they carry socially is incredible.

unsolicited & righteous defence of frank, idk why

looks pretty compositionally strong! hands grasping at, hanging out of white bars, reflections overhead. could put a bunch of red dots and lines over that.

ha it looks like a filmstrip <3

the big difference between Frank and HCB to me is Frank's pessimism vs. HCB's prolificness (and occasional anecdote-ishness). not so much in the relative strength of their compositions.

a big part of Frank's legacy is also about making one focussed book and then quitting.

well I think the received wisdom is that frank replaced the classical formalism of photography til then with this technically very imperfect, underexposed, haphazard style - like he wasn't afraid to leave huge blank spaces in his pictures, negative values become just as telling as the thing depicted. like you could apply the three or four part test in that article to frank's photos and probably half of them would fail.

maybe what's valuable is that HCB's composition-ality points is one way to take good pictures, but it's not the only way, and perhaps you can take just as good pictures by not following those rules

I've always thought that it's illuminating that this is the picture that inspired HCB to start taking photographs

http://i.imgur.com/pjUqd.jpg

hopefully-real-quick clarification, but could you just define/expand on 'negative values' in your post, dayo? sorry to jerk back to technical q&a but i'm sorta interested in whether you're specifically talking about like gradation and rendering, like with the eggleston thing about the difference between seeing different prints of photos & what it was that made them come alive. i can see how those aspects would be particularly relevant to the affect of frank's stuff.

oh I just meant negative space

like I was thinking about the one that you posted from New York Is... like how the lady, ostensibly the subject (or is she...) of the photo, is at the very rightmost of the photo - cropped off.. what are we to make of the rest?

http://ettagirl.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/picture-4.png

or idk, like the way he'll fill in the foreground with... undifferentiated mass, what does that do for the picture compositionally?

http://www.artcritical.com/appel/images/frank_med.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/jcYnS.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/fa8sW.jpg

didn't read the article about HCB but i will say that those last three frank's are hell of formal

Blog dude would probably draw red squiggles on 1 &3 about leading lines and the rule of thirds.
I've always been drawn to imbalance in composition, but I also worship at the altar The Dog

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/38/Goya_Dog.jpg/300px-Goya_Dog.jpg

Blog dude would probably draw red squiggles on 1 &3 about leading lines and the rule of thirds.

that's also kind of the point - you can draw red squiggles + look for congruences in pretty much every picture ever taken

also w/ those pics I was pointing out that there wasn't a 'figure/ground' relationship per se as the HCB blog post was so keen on emphasizing... and the shadow detail was pretty crummy... &c!

well I think I agree that the squiggles/red lines thing can be applied to most pictures. still maintain that Frank's photos are pretty solidly composed. negative space being a tool he used frequently and well.
read this last night, btw, which includes some entertaining line drawing renditions of some Frank compositions: http://jnocook.net/frank/frank.htm
Have yet to read this: http://jnocook.net/frank/rfa.htm - today at work maybe

now that I finally put in a RSS subscript to american suburb x I will probably be posting a lot of links to there too

http://www.americansuburbx.com/series-2/s/suzanne-opton-vermont

this one made me really sad, I wonder what the backstory is

also I realize that plax is probably cringing at my compositional analysis upthread, there are probably v specific painterly terms to be used, it cannot be helped tho

so I got this book from the library and was gonna scan a few of the interviews because they were good, scanned one and did a quick google search and look somebody already put the whole text on the internet

http://www.archive.org/stream/photographywithi00well/photographywithi00well_djvu.txt

I recommend the frank, the szarkowski, the w. eugene smith, probably the sontag as well (haven't read that yet)...

Have yet to read this: http://jnocook.net/frank/rfa.htm - today at work maybe

― lou reed scott walker monks niagra (chinavision!), Thursday, February 23, 2012 9:04 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark

I like the first half of this essay - a 'european perspective'

Blog dude would probably draw red squiggles on 1 &3 about leading lines and the rule of thirds.

that's the thing, I don't think the rule of thirds would work for either 1 or 3 - a good 'rule of thirds' photo of a road would place the horizon line at either the top third or bottom third, with maybe clouds or some scenery filling in the other 'thirds' lines. frank is pretty consciously squeezing the horizon + sky out in 1 and 3, imo

Look at 1 as thirds vertically and divide the top third in half again. It's just at the bottom of edge of the top third that the values change - the road is lighter, there's a semi-horizon as it dips over the hill, etc. - before you get to the real horizon and sky.

Rule of thirds is the laziest and most overrated compositional rule, though (IMO).

even so, the part where the semi-horizon occurs is nowhere near the line delineating the top 'third' of the photograph

the essay CV linked to mentioned that the top pic is just a reinterpretation of this dorothea lange pic

http://i.imgur.com/0CaYw.jpg

which, imo, feels much more stable and composed and probably does yield to a rule of thirds analysis

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/an-amateur-snapshot-of-kodaks-early-days/