Photography is a creative hobby for me. Once I began looking at the world through a viewfinder, I began to notice details. I look more carefully at the world as I walk through it. This way of looking deeply has influenced my attitude toward life. By striving to really see what’s before me, I live more in the moment.
While I’d love to call myself a photographer, I know better. I look at the works of masters, both contemporary and from the early days of photography, and I know I’m miles from mastery of the craft and just as far from the artist’s vision. Rarely do I see an image in black and white when I press the shutter. Sometimes, in an effort to improve a lackluster color photo, I’ll convert it to black and white. This rarely works.
I stare at those timeless images of Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange and wonder if starting out in a color paradigm stunts wannabe photogs. Perhaps color photography is like an automatic transmission: if you first learn to drive an automatic, it is much more difficult to master a manual transmission; likewise, photographers who start out shooting in color are distracted by the razzle-dazzle and fail to master the basics of design and exposure.
I recently stumbled upon a wonderful documentary on Netflix, Henri Cartier-Bresson – The Impassioned Eye, by director Heinz Bütler. The 2003 film explores the life and work of the renowned master of black and white photojournalism.
Cartier-Bresson, his breathing synched to Bach’s music in the background, peers puckishly over the top of one of his images, revealing just the top half of his bright eyes. “What counts,” he says, “is geometry and structure. Everything is where it should be. Geometry is the foundation.” From the body of work displayed in this film, Cartier-Bresson knew what he was talking about. There is structure in each of his photographs. He shot a wide variety of subjects, often in challenging situations. Yet his images are focused and properly exposed. And they all have structure. “When you hit the target there’s no need to crop the picture. Don’t over think it. It’s all in form.”
Cartier-Bresson image from bplatt-photo.blogspot.com
Mystery is another aspect that catapults his work into excellence. A shy man, Cartier-Bresson worked with his subjects, talking to them and asking provocative questions to divert their attention from the lens to the mystery of what was inside of them. His subjects are often gazing away from the lens. We wonder where their eyes are looking. What are they seeing? What are they thinking about? Isabelle Huppert, one of his subjects, explains that Cartier-Bresson “captures the moment just after speech, the moment just after movement.”
Says Huppert, “A great photo has a feeling of music to it.” Cartier-Bresson agrees, his eye’s blinking to the rhythm of Bach, “That’s sacred music. It has everything: life, death, everything. It is pure bliss.” The same could be said of his images.
There is mystery in the photographs of some of my blogging contemporaries, too. Take Dinkerson over at Dinktography for example. His images exude both simplicity and mystery. Who would abandon a piano like this? Who played it? What happened to the people who used to listen to the music that came from it?
Faded Ivory by Dinkerson
I’ll keep working at my hobby. I’ll keep studying the mystery of the craft. I’ll keep my eyes open, roving, looking, seeing the beautiful and the mundane because all of it is life.
Here’s one I actually visualized in B&W
It’s good to learn from the “experts”, but you too are a photographer. It gives you joy and you strive to practice your craft. You ARE a photographer, AND a writer.
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My dear Sybil, thank you! Your flattery has made my day. 🙂
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keine Angst, Du bist schon sehr gut und hast das “richtige Auge”. Wir freuen uns heute schon auf die nächsten Bilder. Danke!
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Vielen Danke Lieber Elmar! 🙂
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So you took that last photo right? I can almost hear the high mountain breeze in it.
I LOVE your summation: “Perhaps color photography is like an automatic transmission:” Really conveys what you’re getting at! And in one sense I get that but in another I wonder if perhaps color is just another dimension, too. B&W offers a visual silence that can be transcendental and definitely more mysterious, and it does highlight the deep, inner bones of an image more. But then I think of some of the brilliant modern shots I’ve seen of tiny, colorful insects or birds or autumn leaves/rainbows/different colors of ice etc. and I see a kind of image captured that B&W isn’t really designed to address. I’ve never really thought about it before reading this (provocative post btw!) but maybe B&W and color are also like different languages. Like Farsi is the language of poetry, French is the language of romance, and English is the language of rational thought. Maybe B&W is the photography of the soul and color is the photography of the heart? (Now I’m just making shit up.)
Great post!
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You”re absolutely right about the brilliance of good color photography. I like what you say about B&W being like a visual silence. That is a good analogy. I also like your analogy of different photography forms mimicking the different facets of languages. That’s one I never thought of. (Trust you to find the best analogies! 😉
The tree? That was a foothills hike this spring. It was up a ridge from the trail…a trail with little more than tall sagebrush.
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RE Dia’s comment: “I’ve never really thought about it before reading this (provocative post btw!) but maybe B&W and color are also like different languages. Like Farsi is the language of poetry, French is the language of romance, and English is the language of rational thought. Maybe B&W is the photography of the soul and color is the photography of the heart?”
That one’s quotable!
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Isn’t everything Dia writes quotable? 😉
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What was the term given to the geometry in paintings and pictures of a ratio of 2/3 to 1/3? Your pictures above have this 2/3 to 1/3 ratio This mix is more appealing to the eye than 1/2 and 1/2 or even weighting. Look at the lines of the horizon, piano lid and then vertically with the building. Good post. BTG
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You’re on the money about the rule of thirds. And being the uptight, orderly idiot that I am, I fight like hell to not frame everything with the visual focus bull’s eye dead center. That shot of the tree is pretty much dead center bit when I tried cropping it differently it lost something. There’s the mystery.
And, thanks, BTW
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You can stop using the word “idiot” from now on. You’ve moved up a notch or two from there.
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😉
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Linda – I think this is one of your best pieces of writing, an articulate, respectful and studied look at both the mystery and mastery of great photography. It reflects what you said about looking through a lens at the world. It forces you see the details – what’s there both in reality and your imagination!
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Thank you very much, Bob! I’m humbling bowing before your praise. 😉
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Wonderful piece on capturing feeling and mystery. I especially like the quote – “A great photo has a feeling of music to it.” I think we like black and white because our imagination fills in the color. Back when you had to use film and have pictures developed, I took a couple of rolls of 35mm of black and white film in Paris. They are still some of my favorite shots of the city, especially the gargoyles on top of Notre Dame – at least my favorite of the pictures I have personally taken. Ansel Adams’ work was definitely brilliant. He did a lot of work around your part of the country didn’t he – Yellowstone, Jackson Hole, Idaho?
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Somehow I slipped right past your comment. Sorry about that. Ansel Adams shot all over the west, but his favorite area was Yosemite in California. He actually ended up living not far from there in San Francisco, I believe. He also shot a lot in New Mexico where he would visit Georgia O’Keefe.
I like your observation about how black and white makes us plumb our imagination. Very perceptive.
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While I admire “real” photographers I’m afraid their mastery is somewhat lost on me who thinks Picasso should have painted his pictures to resemble reality more 😉 However, I enjoy the information value of photographs and yours usually also carry enough soul to make me want to see the things you capture with my own eye. And this last one is certainly skillful enough for my simple taste. Does that sound like a compliment? It is supposed to be one!
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Thank you for the fine compliment Sandra. I think you sell yourself a bit short, as I’ve seen the quality of your own images. I know I’ll never come up with avant-garde masterpieces. I am not innovative and it doesn’t bother me if what I shoot has been done before. The thing is, I haven’t done it before. Or if I have, I was not happy with the outcome. So I keep trying. Thanks for thinking my stuff has soul. Wow. 😉
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Along similar lines, it’s not the camera that makes the photo, it’s the photographer.
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That is so true, John! And I don’t have the money for all the bells and whistles, so it’s up to me, I guess to make do with what I’ve got. I remind myself that Ansel Adams worked without bells and whistles, both in the field and in the darkroom.
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Linda, I agree that the introduction of color changed things. So did the transition from film to digital. And before that, the change from those big, clunky cameras that had photographers developing their own film to the Instamatic cameras that did all the work for you. I guess there are fewer people all the time who see the process as art. You’re one of the exceptions, and I think the masters of photography would love your appreciation of their craft.
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That is interesting, Charles, as I know how hard the early photographers had to fight to be recognized as artists. Painters resented the fact that a mechanized little box had recorded the image and therefore denigrated photographers as mere button pushers. Oh, but there’s so much more to it than pushing a button!
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Linda, please excuse my rude absence. I’m thrilled that one of my photographs could help illustrate your thoughts. 🙂
You know, I tend to stay away from grayscale. From my point of view, grayscale photography, if done properly, is absolutely stunning. My hesitation to use it is that I just don’t understand how it works!
Ansel Adams suggested using subjects that would produce, in the image, a broad variety of shades from almost black to almost white, and as much as possible clearly separated in between. That’s a difficult task to accomplish!
As for your image, I think it’s very well composed. It made me stop, not to critique, but to enjoy. Most of your work accomplishes that effect.
As for using the rule of thirds, would you agree that this is more easily accomplished with a wider framed lens? I believe that with a narrow field of view, it can be challenging to place the subject off-center. Some say that results similar to a wider angle lens can be achieved by simply backing away from the subject, but this can create an image where the subject appears visibly distant.
Just some thoughts.
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