When photography moved from craft to art…
Sometimes change appears right before your eyes…
or in this case, under your feet.
The Museum of Modern Art in NY (MoMA) is opening an exhibition of the photographic work of Henri Cartier Bresson (1908-2004).
Cartier Bresson was one of the founders of Magnum, the photographic agency, but more importantly, he created a style of photojournalism that is with us to this day: the intimate moment.
Any visiting the exhibition will immediately recognize works of Cartier Bresson that have become iconographic. But what I found the most interesting was an off-handed remark in the NY Times review of the opening:
The third and crucial constant in his career was, of course, a camera: in Cartier-Bresson’s case, a hand-held Leica, as neat and sleek as a pistol.
Cartier Bresson certainly had a wonderful eye, but it was the invention of both the Leica (1923) and 35mm film that empowered Cartier Bresson to take the kind of photographs that he did.
Prior to Oskar Barnak’s invention at the Leitz company, cameras were big bulky affairs that required sheet film and had to be supported on a tripod. All of this would have made Cartier Bresson’s way of working all but impossible.
His signature is the intimacy, the captured moment. One cannot really be intimate schlepping around a massive view camera and a tripod. Trust me, I know. A few weeks ago, I experimented with a Toyo view camera and large format sheet film. Great for landscapes and studios, crap for anything else.
For all of its history, video has also been hobbled by the technology – great massive video cameras that required either a tripod or a strong man or woman to manhandle the gear. They were tools of the studio, shoved out into the real world but not made for it.
As a result, our video imagery was, and to a great extent, remains, stiled, stiff, studio-based. Reporters doing stand-ups facing directly into the camera; interview subjects, seated and lighted in their own homes and instructed not to ‘look into the camera’.
In a word – constipated.
Now, along comes a remarkable piece of technology for video – the small, hand-held, HD camera.
Think of it as a Leica for video.
The vast majority of people however, particularly at networks seeking to save money, seem only able to use this remarkable new tool to ape what camera crews have done for 70 years, only not quite so well.
That is not the future for video.
With small HDV cameras we have an opportunity to do for video what Cartier Bresson did for photo journalism – create an entirely new grammar, a new way of seeing the world and showing it to others.
The technology is now here.
What we need is the Cartier Bresson.
3 Comments
fosca April 12, 2010
hey jim, thanks for the link. indeed great pictures mr.dafung collected there and to my big surprise on a still camera with video capabilities. i do not agree with what you said about eddie adams famous execution still. television was not as readily available in the 70s as it is today. therefore people read a lot more. many magazines that long have ceased existance published pictures delivered from vietnam. you will most definitely recall many of the world press photo awarded snaps from years gone bye and the stories linked to them. i do. but who of the general public does recall what happened. i think very few. great stories and pictures will much more than ever be appreciated and remembered only by specialized professionals. gory frames will be appreciated too by the wrong people for the wrong reasons i fear. for the rest its gameshows and living room flower-pics that count. my favourite documentary by the way that combines video- and photography is “war photographer” by christian frei. if your surname is nachtwey you know who it is about anyway.
jim April 11, 2010
Have you seen the work of Dennis Danfung in Afghanistan? http://battleforheartsandminds.com/
If Robert Capa and Larry Burrows were working today this is the type of work they would be doing. Simply stunning work.
Can you imagine Burrows shooting “Yankee Papa 13” on a 5DMKII as a video documentary? He could have pulled out the same stills that made the story famous. The world is changing for photojournalists. What Danfung is doing is the future, and if the trailer is any indication, he’s doing it better than anyone else I’ve seen.
As a still photographer who has dabbled in video I keep coming back to the reality that video does not have the staying power of still images. Going back to Vietnam, the execution captured by Eddie Adams was also filmed by an NBC camera crew. Which do we remember?
It’s the cameras like the Canon 5D MKII and the Lumix GH-1 that are changing the game.
fosca April 11, 2010
not to be forgotten is the fact that HCB didn´t need earn money with his leica as he came from a wealthy family. if i´d know where i could get € 7000,- for an hd-camera, i´d try competing. the ammount of money i quoted is for the camera, some kind of microphone, cable and a reasonable tripod. plus of course some steroid for the laptop i use. luckily i own vegas 8.0 and would therefore only need an update for the ex1r.