Hi Frank,
Thanks for posting such a thoughtful and insightful post. Comments interspersed.
What's so great about HCB? I think for starters, he embraced a new technology, and showed what could be done with it. He allowed that new technology to shape what a photographer could do.
I am, of course, talking about 35mm cameras, specifically 35mm Leica rangefinders.
This is somewhat key to my thinking... he was great, new, different in the context of the times.
They allowed him to get "into" the action, they allowed him to "become one" with the equipment so he could concentrate on the subjects. He could flow in and out of situations almost without being noticed, and get "inside" the subjects in a way that a large bulky press camera would never allow one to do. He could shoot several frames in quick succession, capturing the term that he famously coined, "The Decisive Moment".
And that would in many respects be a snapshot...
He's been called the Father of Photojournalism, but I don't know that that's accurate. I think more along the lines of him doing "reportage": similar to photojournalism but I think it means "not only newsworthy stuff". He could take a street scene, and photograph it in a way that may not interest a newspaper editor, but was nonetheless interesting to a viewer.
Maybe they look like snapshots to you and to a lot of people, and maybe they are snapshots. But, they capture life, events, people in a way that had never been captured before. Not just randomly pressing the shutter button and hoping for the best, but knowing when the "Decisive Moment" is, when everything snaps together, to create an emotionally and aesthetically meaningly document.
Was he really able to capture the decisive moment because he had some special gift, or because he had a new tool that was flexible enough to allow multiple moments to be captured, increasing the chances of having caputured the "Decisive" one?
I think that one has to look at each of his photographs as a whole. They aren't just pictures of people, they are people in their environment. The envirnment becomes an important part of the image. A curved staircase, a bridge fading off into the distance, the top of a wall or a doorway framing a subject - that's what makes these things something more than a snapshot. He was so adept at using the surroundings to draw the eye in a certain direction, to make the photo "flow" one way or the other, to tell us something about the subject that just photographing him or her in front of a dropsheet could never do.
I have seen some of his work I enjoy, for the reasons you mention above.
Much of what made HCB successful had to do with being in the right place at the right time. Shanghai during a run on the bank. Paris right after WWII. India during a very tumultuous time in its history.
I think therein lies a key to great photos. Being in the right place at the right time. Or for many of us, just being someplace at sometime. I find the effort it takes to arrive somewhere or to hike that 2 miles in the rain, is often the major effort excerpted when out on a "photo expedition" (and lugging the 12 lb tripod). Or for my fox photos, which aren't masterpieces, I specifically chose to drive the back way to my house, even though it was longer, and was rewarded for the effort.
I know it doesn't have much to do with his impact on the art or craft (whichever it is) of photography, but being a founder (along with Robert Capa and one other) of the Magnum Agency in Paris is certainly a part of his legacy. It allowed photographers to control their work, to sell images to newspapers and magazines without giving up all rights to those images, to get decent and reasonable compensation for those images.
He was also the first photographer to be displayed in the Louvre, in 1954 - again, that doesn't say anything about his actual photographs, but it does speak to his significance in cultural terms.
I don't know what more to say about him that might explain why he was so great. I suppose if I had to sum it all up in a sentence or two it would be that he took photography out of the studio and turned it into a human art form - in capturing what he came acros in his travels in a way that was just as artistically and culturally meaningful as a painstakingly set up studio or landscape photo. Rather than controlling what went through the lens, he used his camera to capture the "real" (as opposed to the artificial world of the studio) world around him, in a way that had not been done before.
I hope that I haven't made a complete mess of what I'm trying to say, but it's very hard to talk of him in such a short space, in a real and meaningful way.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, some of his photos were pretty blurry... <vbg>
Okay, back to the job search, and back to semi-lurking.
cheers, frank
Thanks Frank. You made me think.
