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Bystander: A History of Street Photography

November 3, 2016 By TC

This book has come in for quite some criticism, perhaps because it explicitly purports to be a ‘history of street photography’. Carefully researched and source-referenced historiography it probably isn’t, but it would be unfair to dismiss this book just in these terms as there is much in it of value.

Writing a history of something as amorphous as ‘street photography’, which is more an attitude than a genre, has its challenges, but Westerbeck does a pretty good job. It’s gratifying that the book starts where it should: Paris. The response to Baudelaire’ peculiar take on photography and the growing synergy between street photography and impressionism and street painting in the turn of the century melting-pot Paris surely laid the foundations to much that was to follow:  Atget and the photography of the street; surrealism that was to find later expression in Brandt and Cartier-Bresson; humanism through Doisneau, Erwhitt; realism through Brassai and thence to the ‘gritty realism’ of Frank, Klein and Winogrand.

And it’s here that the book falls down for me. Despite a promising start, the book does not really get to grips with the various ‘flavours’ ( I won’t say ‘schools’) of street photography. We get the odd glimpse at an attempt to analyse developments, such as the chapter on the ‘Chicago School’, but proceeding chronologically through time to the 1980s acts more show discontinuities rather than similarities. It would have been better to have traced the history of street photography through the lines of influence and against developments in the wider world of the arts and society. The sense of separation that the writers accord to street photography, separate from the context of social developments, means that we don’t really get a sense of street photography’s place in our culture, its worth.

Despite this however, I enjoyed the many anecdotal reflections, particularly from Meyerowitz, a photographer who I deeply admire. Well worth a read.

 

 

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‘The Open Road’ by David Campany

February 19, 2016 By TC

David Campany’s book “The Open Road: Photography & the American Road Trip” (Publisher: Aperture ISBN: 9781597112406) is the first book to explore the photographic road trip as a genre in its own right. When asked why the American open road is such an attraction for American and foreign photographers alike, Campany replied:

The myth of space and the space of myth”.

[Read more…]

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Filed Under: Books, books - open road, post Tagged With: David Campany, Joel Sternfeld, Ryan McGinley, The Open Road, Todd Hido

Who are the best writers on photography?

December 8, 2014 By TC Leave a Comment

I immediately think of the “big four”: Barthes, Sontag, Benjamin and Berger, of course. Roland Barthes Camera Lucida was ground-breaking at the time, but I tire of semiotics and structuralism. Sontag? Again hugely important in the genre. I read “On Photography” in 1978, but it didn’t speak to me at the time and still I find it dry and dull. A giant that Walter Benjamin is of photographic criticism, again it’s hard work isn’t it? [Read more…]

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Filed Under: blog, Books, post, post best writesr on street photos Tagged With: Barthes, Benjamin, Geoff Dyer, Gerry Badger, Ian Jeffrey, John Berger, Leo Steinberg, Sontag, Szarkowski

Book review – Street Photography: From Atget to Cartier-Bresson by Clive Scott

October 24, 2014 By TC Leave a Comment

Street Photography: From Atget to Cartier-BressonStreet Photography: From Atget to Cartier-Bresson by Clive Scott

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Clive Scott is professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia. His approach to documenting the origins and development of street photography (“SP”) is scholastic, but nonetheless, with applied effort, absorbing and thought-provoking.

His approach is grounded in the tradition of photographic criticism. “My history is … somewhat capricious and designed to serve the specific tasks I have set myself”‘ he says in his introduction. Hence, it rewards the determined reader.

A very good job is made of capturing the complex relationship between impressionism and photography and putting this into the context of contemporary literary thought.

I particularly liked his discussion of the emergence of photography “out of the studio and into the street”; from the enmity of Charles Baudelaire to the position where photography is seen as the “art of the imaginary par excellence” (Soulages).

For readers who want a simple historical account of the development of street photography, this book will not be for you. If however, you want to understand the history of SP against an emerging tradition of photographic criticism and an interest in the phenomenological roots of photography, then please take some effort to read this book. Effort it will take, but rewarded you will be.

 

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Filed Under: Book - clive scott, Books Tagged With: Clive Scott

The Power of the Centre

October 15, 2014 By TC Leave a Comment

The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual ArtsThe Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts by Rudolf Arnheim

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The world is being blinded by the tidal wave of photographs pushed through social media. So much noise, so little of lasting value.

And if like me, you aspire to artistic photography ..”not through argument but through feeling”, working to “close the gap between you and everything that is not you” [to quote “Shock of the New” by Robert Hughes], then perhaps going back to some “basics” is just the tonic the gin ordered.

Enter: “The Power of the Centre” (“POC”) by Rudolf Arnheim, a study of composition in the visual arts. Arnheim can’t write, but we can forgive him that given that his project was to explore the cognitive basis of art, and by extension, the world. His classic work, “Art and Visual Perception” was ground-breaking, but hard work. The POC is far easier to read even given its dry academic style.

Effort is rewarded though.

The argument builds. From an introduction into spatial systems and force fields, a comprehensive analysis of many examples of art follows taking each element that creates visual perception: centres, hubs and weight, frames, volumes and nodes, latches and vectors. The book springs to life as it examines the perceptual forces that make some pictures “work”. My favourite examples include Manet’s Le Rendez-Vous de Chats (1870) for its Latch, Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques (1905) for its Hubs, and Munch’s Sick Girl (1896) for the effect of its square Frame.

But useful as I found the book, I also felt slightly becalmed. We are given glimpses of a more fundamental underlying psychological imperative at work, as in the chapter on “The Viewer as Centre” and “Seeing the World Sideways” – “… the difficulty is that we look at our world sideways. Instead of facing it as a detached viewer, we are in it and of it. … our view interprets and misinterprets our position”. But we are left without a wind in our sails. What psychological universals are at work in our visual apprehension of the world? How do these reveal the workings of our minds?

A tad unfair of me? Perhaps! But if nothing else, this book woke me up to some basic insights into what makes a picture grab a viewer. In these times of 40 plus billion photographs being published annually, I need every little help I can get! Composition is the bedrock upon which artistic endeavour depends. Without it, you are just back to taking snaps.

 

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Filed Under: book - power of the centre, Books, post Tagged With: Arnheim, Composition

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