my street

the aesthetics of street photography

You are here: Home / Archives for Books

Bystander: A History of Street Photography

By

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.

 

 

‘The Open Road’ by David Campany

By

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…]

Who are the best writers on photography?

By

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…]

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

By

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.

 

The 2014 Kassel “Fotobook Festival” – who would you have voted for?

By

I just love photo books. In the UK we have Martin Parr and Gerry Badger to thank for a revival of the photobook medium. I often dip into their books “The Photobook Volumes 1 and 2” and will be shortly buying the new 3rd volume.

The Kassel Photo Book Award 2014 went to Frédéric Brenner ‘s “An Archeology of Fear and Desire” but not after stiff competition from 29 other contenders. Social documentary (my own predilection) was well represented by:

  1. Piergiorgio Casotti’s  “Sometimes I Cannot Smile”, a study of juvenile suicide in East Greenland
  2. Mark Cohen’s “Dark Knees”, a photobook by a street photographer with a surrealist perspective. For me, Cohen is one of the greatest street photographers. “Grim Street”, although not my current style of street photography, had a profound influence on me.
  3. Eamonn Doyle’s  “i” , beautiful colour studies of individual people in the street
  4. Jim Goldberg’s “Rich and Poor”, shocking and gripping portrait of contemporary America
  5. David Hornillos’ “Mediodía”, an enveloping world of orange brick bathed in vibrant light from the vicinity of Madrid’s Atocha station, and last but certainly not least,
  6.  Vasantha Yoganantha’s “Piémanson”, perhaps my favourite, an exploration of daily life on the last “wild beach’ in France. The beach’s history began in the 1970s when locals set up camp there with no rights or deeds. Nowadays, thousands of campers from all over Europe get together every summer season, looking for a freedom that they can’t find anywhere else

But despite my predilection for social documentary, my overall award would have gone to Michael Schmidt’s  “Natur”.

‘Natur’ is the latest published photobook of Berliner photographer Michael Schmidt (1945-2014). Reminscent of John Gossage’s “The Pond”, ‘Natur’  reveals a parallel universe to Berlin’s urban territory overlooked by the presence of the Wall. Images of empty and unwelcome spaces at first work quietly and for a while un-possessively, but wait a while and the images rush back like a train hurtling through a tunnel.

by J Gossage – S-Bahn series

 

The Power of the Centre

By

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.