Just finished reading [amazon asin=”0801871670″&text=”Disappearing Witness: Change in Twentieth-Centu​ry American Photography”] by Gretchen Garner, in which she describes how photography (and not just in America) in the first half of the century was defined by what she calls ‘spontaneous witness’ (think Cartier-Bresson and the ‘decisive moment’), outward-looking, documentary, and in the second half became much more personal, inward-looking. It is a very easy read, her ‘story’ never drags and it is always informative. »
Archived from 2012
Of course, I knew the name Cartier-Bresson, and I could recognize (some of) his more famous photographs, but it seemed he was concerned with street photography, and I was not, and so he did not have much relevance, or interest, to me. Some time back I happened upon a link to a video of an interview Charlie Rose did with him in 2000 and last month I got to watch it. What stood out for me was his personality, his approach to life, and photography, and that made his photography so much more interesting.
I managed to work out which book Charlie Rose had been using in the interview, reviewed it at the local library, saw it was a good selection of his (early) work and well-reproduced, and bought myself a (used) copy. The library also had a DVD on Cartier-Bresson, so I took a look at that, and then looked to see what else was available and found [amazon asin=”B002ZTQVMU”&text=”Henri Cartier-Bresson (Two-Disc Collector& rsquo;s Edition)”] and it came today. It really has a lot of material on it. It will take me a while to watch all of this. »
If you ever visit a forum where the subject is post-processing and/or printing, you will have seen a subject line like “my prints are too dark” many times; alternatively expressed as ‘my print doesn’t match my screen’. So many times in fact, that the experts now will instantly swoop »
This week we got a couple of days out of Ann Arbor and met with an author in St Joseph. We had hoped to meet with another author in Saugatuck, but schedules never meshed. We had to content ourselves with a hike through the Saugatuck State Park to the »