let us now catalogue famous people

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/

oh & http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/kodaks-amateur-photographers-new-york/

these are pretty stunning: richard mosse, went to the congo with some militarized infared film that turns everything with chlorophyll red http://richardmosse.com/photography.php?pid=1

http://www.emptykingdom.com/main/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Richard-Mosse_web1.jpg

I see Jason Eskenazi has been brought up - just ordered his Wonderland book.

Love his video on Kickstarter:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1903672981/the-black-garden-a-new-photography-project

wonderland is prob my fav photography book after the americans

http://www.adammarelliphoto.com/2011/06/robert-capa/

dude who wrote about HCB does Capa
I do think he had a point w/ some of the HCB shots (like the Japanese women facing different directions)
but a bunch of these are silly, with the 'diagonals of the Chinese pilot' the worst. His eyes are horizontal to the frame and don't line up diagonally with anything else, but they get a black line (instead of red)

http://lalettredelaphotographie.com/entries/5602/mort-de-ishimotoyasuhiro

xp when you have a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail

you could probably do a lines analysis of every flickr member's gallery

Harry spoke of his work as an extension of his life; in a grant proposal he wrote that he would use the money “to photograph as I felt and desired; to regulate a pleasant form of living; to get up in the morning—free, to feel the trees, the grass, the water, sky or buildings, people—everything that affects us; and to photograph that which I saw and have always felt.”

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2012/03/eleanor-callahan-harry-callahan.html

photo booth v good this week

http://life.time.com/culture/its-about-time-gjon-milis-stroboscopic-portraits/

i know this isn't double exposure, exactly, but double exposure is one of those early-attractions-of-photography, cf lens flare, that i never play with anymore

I love taking pictures of stores with glass displays because in B&W it looks like a double exposure, you get two for the price of one

however I'm not sure I've ever fully understood conscious double exposure - transposing two radically different scenes - don't really understand harry callahan's double exposure photographs, wish somebody would explain them to me

Got 'Wonderland' today - normally I'm 100% opposed to photos crossing the gutter at all, but this is the perfect binding if you're going to make everything a double-truck spread, it lays flat enough that the images aren't compromised.

have generally hated pictures across the gutter too, but I like the way that a lot of japanese photo books through caution to the wind wrt cropping, printing quality, image placement etc. AND I just discovered an amazing store in NYC, Kinokuniya, that has a *lot* of photo books. picked up W. Eggleston's Paris which I've wanted for a couple years and put off getting, and a Morimaya book. They've got full shelves of Morimaya and Araki books though, and many more that are a mystery to me, AND tons of Japanese photo magazines, including ones that seem to have endless profiles of all manor of vintage film cameras, only I can't read them!

ugh through = throw, where is my brain

and manor = manner, of course

anyway, I was never in the mood for that sort of high contrast, heavily cropped, low quality printing before, but I appreciate it now as a change of pace from the immaculately printed and pristine photo books I'm used to.

they stocked Photographica magazine, but sadly not this back issue: http://kenshukan.net/john/archives/2009/12/30/travel-photography-by-photographica/

tons of Japanese photo magazines, including ones that seem to have endless profiles of all manor of vintage film cameras

by stuff, I mean magazines that aren't really stories or histories of vintage gear, just pictures of it with cataloging details

gaaaah I wanted to pick this up but now it's sold out

http://www.japanexposures.com/books/product_info.php?products_id=10336