Cartier-Bresson

[Ben Calwell]

I saw a piece on Henri Cartier-Bresson the other night on PBS. The report said he had no interest in darkroom work, and I took that to mean that he didn't process and print his negatives. The photographs are wonderful, technically and aesthetically. I can't believe Cartier-Bresson would just hand off a roll to someone and say, "well, here it is, go develop and print it." He must have given whomever did the work some instructions on development. Does anyone know who he trusted to develop and print his negatives?

[Brian Ellis]

Can't remember the name but he became fairly famous for doing C-B's printing. He wrote an article, or maybe even a book, in which he talked about how bad the negatives were and how difficult they were to print. I'm sure someone else will remember his name, it's in the dim recesses of my aged brain somewhere and refuses to come out right now.

[Ben Calwell]

It's interesting to ponder C-B as a man who apparently had no interest in the relationship between exposure and development (or maybe he did have a handle on that). Whoever took his bad negatives and made them into masterful prints must have been an absolute genius in the darkroom.

[BetterSense]

I always figured that it was this fact that lead him to insist on printing everything full-frame. Having someone else do his printing is one thing, but letting them crop the composition is another thing completely. It's easier to say "I have no interest in the process, I just take the pictures" when the darkroom worker is not allowed to alter the composition of the photograph. If I worked in a situation where someone else was printing my work, I would also insist that they print the whole frame. It would be the easiest way for me to maintain artistic autonomy and be able to call myself "the photographer".

[Gudmundur Ingolfsson]

http://www.picto.fr/
Pierre Gassmann was the printer

[Marko]

According to some quotes, and he apparently had a lot to say about it, his primary if not the only concern was the moment of capture, the slice of time as he called it. Photography just happened to be tool that allowed it, but if there were any other tools he would've been just as happy to use them as well or instead.

Here are some of his quotes that illustrate this attitude:


Once the picture is in the box, I'm not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren't cooks.

Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important

Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity.

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.

The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.

What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm – the relationship between shapes and values.

Pictures, regardless of how they are created and recreated, are intended to be looked at. This brings to the forefront not the technology of imaging, which of course is important, but rather what we might call the eyenology (seeing).

I can see how all of this can rub many a member of this board the wrong way, but his results are hard to argue with.

[Steven Barall]

I saw some of the Bresson greatest hits photos at the Met Museum a couple of years ago in a really really great show about photography from 1840-1940, and the quality of the prints was terrible. Bresson could barely get the light to stick to the film, underexposing it at least three stops. Who ever had to print that stuff must have cursed up a storm, in french of course with a Gauloises hanging out of his mouth and a glass of red wine on a shelf above the sink. Very civilized those French are.

Robert Frank was the same way. His negs were considered unprintable. Sid Kaplan was the only person able to print Frank's negs and if it had not been for Kaplan, we might not have ever heard of Robert Frank.

We need philosophers and engineers both to make life good.

[Mike Anderson]

...
I can see how all of this can rub many a member of this board the wrong way, but his results are hard to argue with.

Small film AND no interest in developing/printing?!?! The guy should have his fingers broken and his eyes put out and given an infraction point!:)

Seriously, I find the contrast interesting. HCB is at the other end of the spectrum from the LF mentality. It's like 2 very different sports, they just both happen to be played with a camera.

...Mike

[csant]

Small film AND no interest in developing/printing?!?! The guy should have his fingers broken and his eyes put out and given an infraction point!:)

Digital photography would just have been perfect for him.

[Marko]

Seriously, I find the contrast interesting. HCB is at the other end of the spectrum from the LF mentality. It's like 2 very different sports, they just both happen to be played with a camera.

...Mike

Well, he said something about that too:

"Photography appears to be an easy activity; in fact it is a varied and ambiguous process in which the only common denominator among its practitioners is in the instrument."

:)

[JMB]

I understand that Vincent Van Gogh didn't paint his own pictures either. Once he set up his canvas, he really didn't care much about what happened next.

[Ben Calwell]

I like "the hunters aren't cooks" quote -- that's great.

[Walter Calahan]

He did have a vision on how the print should appear. He supervised all the prints made by a master printer, and would reject those that did not meet his standards for a finished print. William Eggleston does the same with his color photography.

[Ben Calwell]

I thought he must have had some input into the final print. I had this vision of him dropping his film off at the corner drugstore and not particularly caring about what came back, as long as there was an image.
Which leads me to another question: Would C-B's work be lauded even if the print quality had been horrible?
In other words, the subject matter is so compeling that it doesn't matter if the prints hadn't met some expert's notion as to what constitutes a technically good print?
Maybe in the genre of photojournalism, getting fine art print quality is not so important. But C-B's work that I saw on my TV screen certainly had that "fine art" tonality to it, a testament to Mr. Gassman's darkroom skills.
Sorry to ramble on.

[Marko]

The way I understand him, it's not that he wasn't concerned with the quality of the print - his main premise was that a photograph is meant to be viewed, after all - it's just that he wasn't concerned with the means and methods to get there.

IOW, if he were living and working today, he probably wouldn't care at all if his photographs were made viewable using film, digital or some combination, as long as the end result was presentable enough to match his vision.

HCB was pretty good with words and he wrote a lot of it down and published in a book titled The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson. (ISBN: 0670786640). A required reading, IMHO, for anybody even remotely interested in photojournalism as a genre.

[D. Bryant]

IOW, if he were living and working today, he probably wouldn't care at all if his photographs were made viewable using film, digital or some combination, as long as the end result was presentable enough to match his vision.



http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10966

Bresson was wealthy and could afford good cameras, in particular Leicas, and could afford to hire excellent darkroom technicians.

He was no slouch exposing film and demanded quality prints. He composed top to bottom and side to side and did not need to crop, in part due to his mastery of the Leica RF camera, though some comps may have been cropped slightly. He hated cropping by photo editors. He also worked in the era of looking at contact sheets and probably would have not liked working with a color DSLR since he preferred a rangefinder. Who knows what he may have thought about the M9( but since it is a film less camera that didn't produce his contact sheets easily one has to assume that he would prefer an M7 today). And because he hated cropping he most likely would have not trusted digital photography because it can be so easily altered distorting his vision, even when done ever so slightly. Think about what Newsweek and Time do on covers these days.

In a sense he made paper movies, early in his career making modern surreal studies of the world and then later he needed to select a shot from a sequence of related shots though he strived for the singular decisive moment (actually he called it pictures on the run) with his reportage. It's no accident that he was one of the founding members of Magnum. He defined and set the standard of reportage with the small rangefinder camera.

Thankfully I will get to see this new exhibit in it's entirety. I suspect many of us would love to be able to hire our own personal darkroom tech printing to our specifications allowing us to concentrate on exposing film.

[Ben Calwell]

Marko -- thanks for the book recommendation.

[Robert Brummitt]

What about other photographers who did do much darkroom time?
I had read a Margaret Bourke-White bio and it suggested that she too didn't do time in the darkroom. Who else?
Did Mapplethorp? Did Karsh? Just curious.

[Marko]

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10966

Bresson was wealthy and could afford good cameras, in particular Leicas, and could afford to hire excellent darkroom technicians.

He was no slouch exposing film and demanded quality prints. He composed top to bottom and side to side and did not need to crop, in part due to his mastery of the Leica RF camera, though some comps may have been cropped slightly. He hated cropping by photo editors. He also worked in the era of looking at contact sheets and probably would have not liked working with a color DSLR since he preferred a rangefinder. Who knows what he may have thought about the M9( but since it is a film less camera that didn't produce his contact sheets easily one has to assume that he would prefer an M7 today). And because he hated cropping he most likely would have not trusted digital photography because it can be so easily altered distorting his vision, even when done ever so slightly. Think about what Newsweek and Time do on covers these days.

There are actually two totally different aspects there - the capture and the processing. He was all about capture and he loved his Leica, compared it to a "long tender kiss" and to "firing an automatic pistol", among other things. So yes, it is more than likely that he would've hated working with any SLR, and he didn't.

I am not so sure about the processing, though. What Newsweek and Time do these days is simply irrelevant, most of journalism and especially paper journalism has been going down the tube ever since the invention of 24/7 news cycle and it is now gone so far along that most "editors" can't even see where the paper roll is...

As far as cropping is concerned, HCB was right when he held technology irrelevant - it is equally easily accomplished traditionally as it is digitally. It would likely be the same editors doing the cropping either way. Ditto for contact sheets - with digital, they don't even have to be printed, they can be produced with a single click and viewed on the screen, in color or monochrome, right side up.

This is all, of course, just guessing based on what he had to say about photography, processing and technology of his day. To my knowledge, he didn't say anything about new technologies (as opposed to, say, Elliott Erwitt, another favorite of mine, who was very explicit about it), but I have a feeling that he would've liked the M9.

We will never know, but this was a great opportunity to re-read some of the great thoughts he had to share.

Thanks for starting this thread, Ben. :)

[arunrajmohan]

What about other photographers who did do much darkroom time?
I had read a Margaret Bourke-White bio and it suggested that she too didn't do time in the darkroom. Who else?
Did Mapplethorp? Did Karsh? Just curious.

Sebastião Salgado is another photographer who just hires a developer / printer. Guess they just do not have time to think of developing and printing processes. This strategy is well justified by the quality of their projects in my opinion.

[Brian Ellis]

According to some quotes, and he apparently had a lot to say about it, his primary if not the only concern was the moment of capture, the slice of time as he called it. Photography just happened to be tool that allowed it, but if there were any other tools he would've been just as happy to use them as well or instead.

Here are some of his quotes that illustrate this attitude . . . I can see how all of this can rub many a member of this board the wrong way, but his results are hard to argue with.

It doesn't rub me the wrong way, I think they're interesting quotes. But I had to smile at the fifth one. If you look at his contact sheets (some of which have been published) you see that he generally worked like most other 35mm street photographers - make a whole bunch of photographs of a particular scene and then later pick the best one from the contact sheets. If he had been a digital photographer we'd call it "spray and pray." He was a great photographer but he stretched the truth to a breaking point when he said or implied that he waited for the "decisive moment" and then clicked the shutter once and only once to capture it. That wasn't at all how he actually worked for his street scene stuff, it was more like the "decisive edit" as one of my former photography professors called it.

The fact is that like many great artists, good old C-B wasn't a very nice person - selfish, self-centered, egotistical, dishonest, and frankly an outright fraud in some respects. But we judge him by his art, not his character.

Anyone who wants a really good read about C-B's personality and his working methods should try to find the book "Sextet - T.S. Eliot & Truman Capote & Others" by John Malcolm Brinnnin. C-B is one of the "Others." The book includes a hilarious account of a lengthy photo trip the author took with C-B for the purpose of publishing a book of C-B's photographs and the author's writing. Despite their supposedly co-equal status, C-B treated the author like his personal servant and eventually reneged on their agreement to split the money. All told in a more or less affectionate, and very humorous, way.

[Marko]

It doesn't rub me the wrong way, I think they're interesting quotes. But I had to smile at the fifth one. If you look at his contact sheets (some of which have been published) you see that he generally worked like most other 35mm street photographers - make a whole bunch of photographs of a particular scene and then later pick the best one from the contact sheets. If he had been a digital photographer we'd call it "spray and pray." He was a great photographer but he stretched the truth to a breaking point when he said or implied that he waited for the "decisive moment" and then clicked the shutter once and only once to capture it. That wasn't at all how he actually worked for his street scene stuff, it was more like the "decisive edit" as one of my former photography professors called it.

Not to argue - I think you made really good points - but I never got an impression that he even implied "one and only one click". He kept talking about capturing a decisive moment, but that's not necessarily the same as "one shot one kill", so to speak.

He did compare his Leica to "firing an automatic pistol", though, and I have a rather strong feeling that the average American Liberal (for the want of a better term) would have absolutely no clue as to what he really meant by that... :D

[D. Bryant]

with digital, they don't even have to be printed, they can be produced with a single click and viewed on the screen, in color or monochrome, right side up.

It doesn't get any simpler than shooting 35 mm B&W and handing the film to your darkroom tech and getting contact prints back. No computers, no batteries, no P&S digital cameras used for light meters and so forth.

Bresson was not a commoner and would never do any darkroom work digital or analog. And I think he was very wise not to do so since he didn't need to.

Walker Evans didn't do his own darkroom work either and we regard him as one of the immortals of the 20th century. Ditto for Maplethrope, Haas, Bubley, and Levitt and so on.

Don Bryant

[Marko]

It doesn't get any simpler than shooting 35 mm B&W and handing the film to your darkroom tech and getting contact prints back. No computers, no batteries, no P&S digital cameras used for light meters and so forth.

I think it depends on one's comfort zone and skill level. Having done enough of both, I think sticking a card into a computer and clicking a button is much simpler than developing film, drying film, exposing contact sheet, developing contact sheet, drying contact sheet... It's much faster too.

As for the rest, based on his own words, I just don't think that HCB would've cared (much) which process was used as long as he got the results he expected. He certainly wasn't hung on technicalities, he was too busy taking photographs.

[William McEwen]

Can't remember who said it -- a famous photographer once said the insistence that a photographer process and print his own work is a uniquely American concept.

Karsh developed his own negs and made the first master print. Then his darkroom printer used that as a guide for future prints.

For what it's worth, and I know I've mentioned this, but a couple of years ago I saw several Helmut Newton original prints for the first time. Newton didn't do his own darkroom work, but he supervised it closely and was picky, and he said he was constantly testing his films. Anyway, these prints --- huge, huge prints, from 35mm negatives -- were incredibly well printed. Just gorgeous.

[D. Bryant]

huge, huge prints, from 35mm negatives -- were incredibly well printed. Just gorgeous.

Yep they are sweet!

Don Bryant

[Ben Calwell]

This is a real eye opener for me. I just always assumed that all the great photographers did their own processing and printing. I'm amazed to learn that Walker Evans, one of my favorite photographers, didn't do his own darkroom work. It somehow doesn't seem right.
It seems to me that for those who did not do their own printing, then their printers should get some recognition in exhibitions. Such as "photograph by Walker Evans; print produced by so-and-so."
Taking photographs and then processing and printing the film, to me, are so intertwined.
It would be like Matisse, using his artist's eye, picking out a scene and then hiring another painter to paint it. "Here are some tubes of paint, brushes and a canvas -- go to it. But I'm going to get credit for the painting."
Silly, I know.

[Sascha Welter]

Ben, indeed in the 19th century there was some discussion about this. I remember one historic photography book who mentioned one photographer doing pictures around the time of the american civil war who for every print listed both the photographer and the printer. The story was that he used to print another, well-known photographer's stuff before, without getting recognition. So when he "opened his own shop", he changed that.

Sadly I don't remember neither the title of the book, nor the photographer or printer, but I guess someone here could come up with the name.

[Ed Richards]

Someone asked whether we would still revere C-B if the prints were lousy. Ever seen an Arbus exhibition? I saw an exhibit at the Gerry of Arbus and was shocked at how bad the prints were, at least technically.

The A-Gallery in New Orleans (a wonderful photo gallery) had a show with a number of C-B and AA prints together. It was a great illustration of the limited importance of sharpness or drama in the prints, as compared to the subject matter. AA prints were often of mundane subjects that were transformed by the light and the printing. C-B's prints were competent, but in no way was their power related to the printing, only the image.

BTW, there is a great documentary film about C-B that includes some shots of him working with his printer.

[Brian Ellis]

I think it depends on one's comfort zone and skill level. Having done enough of both, I think sticking a card into a computer and clicking a button is much simpler than developing film, drying film, exposing contact sheet, developing contact sheet, drying contact sheet... It's much faster too.

I think you're perhaps confusing more labor with more complexity. No question developing film involves a lot more physical labor than processing a digital image (though there's much more to that too than "clicking a button" but we won't go there). But more complex? I don't think so. Once you've processed film for a while you can pretty much do it in your sleep just so someone is around to wake you up when the allotted time for each step is at hand. If processing film was a complex matter photographers who had the money to hire a darkroom assistant wouldn't have done so.

[Brian Ellis]

Someone asked whether we would still revere C-B if the prints were lousy. Ever seen an Arbus exhibition? I saw an exhibit at the Gerry of Arbus and was shocked at how bad the prints were, at least technically.

The A-Gallery in New Orleans (a wonderful photo gallery) had a show with a number of C-B and AA prints together. It was a great illustration of the limited importance of sharpness or drama in the prints, as compared to the subject matter. AA prints were often of mundane subjects that were transformed by the light and the printing. C-B's prints were competent, but in no way was their power related to the printing, only the image.

BTW, there is a great documentary film about C-B that includes some shots of him working with his printer.

I've never seen an Arbus original but I'm very surprised to learn they were bad. Her husband did all her darkroom work at least until their divorce and I think for some time afterwards. He was a very fine, and very picky, printer. In her biography the author talks about how aggravated she sometimes became with him as he spent an entire night in the darkroom working on one print.

[Brian Ellis]

This is a real eye opener for me. I just always assumed that all the great photographers did their own processing and printing. I'm amazed to learn that Walker Evans, one of my favorite photographers, didn't do his own darkroom work. It somehow doesn't seem right.
It seems to me that for those who did not do their own printing, then their printers should get some recognition in exhibitions. Such as "photograph by Walker Evans; print produced by so-and-so."
Taking photographs and then processing and printing the film, to me, are so intertwined.
It would be like Matisse, using his artist's eye, picking out a scene and then hiring another painter to paint it. "Here are some tubes of paint, brushes and a canvas -- go to it. But I'm going to get credit for the painting."
Silly, I know.

In the days before photography, when etchings and other forms of printing were the norm, the printer did get equal recognition. When you see two names at the bottom of an old etching (using the term loosely) one is the artist, the other is the printer ("printer" meaning the person who did the woodcut or whatever the material was).

Actually your Matisse analogy isn't that far-fetched. Some of the well-known (so well known I can't think of their names right now : - )) contemporary photographer/artists come up with the concept and then hire teams of laborers (or use graduate students, if the photographer/artist teaches) to do the work of putting it together.

[Marko]

I think you're perhaps confusing more labor with more complexity. No question developing film involves a lot more physical labor than processing a digital image (though there's much more to that too than "clicking a button" but we won't go there). But more complex? I don't think so. Once you've processed film for a while you can pretty much do it in your sleep just so someone is around to wake you up when the allotted time for each step is at hand. If processing film was a complex matter photographers who had the money to hire a darkroom assistant wouldn't have done so.

I'm not confusing it, I never thought processing film was complex. I was simply referring both to the amount of physical labor AND the amount of time required to get a set of contact prints from the moment of handing the roll/card to the technician. I don't think HCB would've been too concerned with complexity because he was having others do that work for him anyway.

As I said, I did my fair share of both and I find it both easier and faster to do with a computer. While computer is undeniably more complex, it is possible and rather straightforward to automatize a set of tasks required to produce and print a set of "contacts" almost with a click of a button or a flick of the mouse. No more than a few clicks anyway.

But as you said, let's not go there, that was just a sidenote, a response to one of someone else's little jabs, and completely irrelevant to this topic.

[Michael Alpert]

This is a real eye opener for me. I just always assumed that all the great photographers did their own processing and printing. I'm amazed to learn that Walker Evans, one of my favorite photographers, didn't do his own darkroom work. It somehow doesn't seem right. . . .

Ben,

Both Cartier-Bresson and Evans knew how to print. They, in fact, knew quite a lot about darkroom work. I've seen beautiful, fine prints made personally by both Cartier-Bresson and Evans. This whole discussion has been laced with misinformation. (It is true that some of Evans' negatives are uneven to the point of being unprintable, but he often processed film in the field. If anyone else had made those negatives, they probably would not have been preserved.) As each of these photographers became older, they wanted to spend more of their time finding new photographs, not endlessly repeating what they had already done. (I don't know how old you are; if you are still a youngster, you'll learn only too soon about this perspective.)

If one sees photography as a print-making activity, like intaglio or hand lithography, having master printers make prints (after the artist has established a finished print to be copied) is not dishonest or unethical. The printers are in a "work for hire" situation and are important but not central to the whole process.

I find awkward prints personally made by artists such as Josef Sudek or Edward Weston to be more compelling as art than prints that seem more mechanically perfect made by master printers. (In those dumbbell "Master Printer" instruction books, I usually like the "before" pictures better than the "after.") Still, a stunning George Tice print is really a pleasure (George is his own master printer); I guess it all depends on the artist.

Just one more thought, the late prints of Cartier-Bresson really are terrible. Cartier-Bresson lost the printer he had worked with for decades, so in old age he was at a loss about what to do. I don't think he was at his best when he signed those poorly-made prints.

[Gordon Moat]

Funny how craft is often looked at a different level. Toil does not make an image better. The only analogy I feel fits well is architecture. The architect does not build the building or structure with his/her bare hands, yet when we think of the result their name is on it. Decisive moment to me is simply releasing the shutter, and no matter what comes after, that aspect has the greatest impact on the image results.

Whether it is Photoshopped within an inch of its' life later, dodged and burned for hours in a darkroom, or steeped in an odd chemical brew of the users choosing, that starting point of releasing the shutter was still the primary driver of the resulting image. There are master Photoshop, and master darkroom, technicians, and their skills should be highly valued, but without a compelling start, all the skill and craft possible will not elevate a mediocre image to vaulted heights.

I enjoy photographic images in books nearly as much as I enjoy display prints. While most would agree that display prints are their preferred viewing choice, I think few would deny the impact of compelling images in a nicely (machine) printed book. Take a look at Albert Watson (http://www.albertwatson.net/)'s book Cyclops, which is duotone B/W press printed, and the result in my opinion conveys the power of his images. In a similar manner, I can enjoy images seen on the internet, despite that there is little technical mastery in showing those images.

Ciao!

Gordon Moat Photography (http://www.gordonmoat.com)

[Marko]

Albert Watson's images are great, but his website is doing him great disservice by resizing the window without asking the user. The only reason I did not click away and left the site at the very first frame was that I wanted to take look in the context of this thread.

Any work that attempts to force a certain way of looking at it is essentially telling me that I am too stupid to decide that for myself. Definitely not a very good way to get and keep my attention. Especially when it's done using the media intended by its very nature to be controlled by the end user.

[D. Bryant]

Ben,

Both Cartier-Bresson and Evans knew how to print. They, in fact, knew quite a lot about darkroom work. I've seen beautiful, fine prints made personally by both Cartier-Bresson and Evans.

Bresson has never substantiated this, in fact he is quoted as not liking darkroom printing and development because he was incompetent at darkroom work (his words). Making the photograph was the most important part of the creative process since he was in complete control of that.

Where can these fine prints made by Bresson can be found?

No one is exactly sure how many photographs he made in his lifetime. The estimate is in excess of 15,000 rolls of 35mm B&W. Many of the rolls he never actually saw the prints and did editing personally being sent away from the field to some distant lab, this was particularly true after he became a Magnum photographer.

He also shot some medium format, using both B&W & color film to complete commercial & magazine assignements. In the end he didn't care much for his color work nor the MF camera. He always preferred his beloved Leicas.

Don Bryant


Don Bryant

[Gudmundur Ingolfsson]

When I was very young I was an assistant to an institutional collector and there were prints made by the greats of photography like HCB and Bill Brandt. They would never have counted as good printers. Very soft and almost greenish gray prints on luster paper of first years after the WW 2 vintage. I think no one ever gets to see those bad prints any more.

[D. Bryant]

When I was very young I was an assistant to an institutional collector and there were prints made by the greats of photography like HCB and Bill Brandt. They would never have counted as good printers. Very soft and almost greenish gray prints on luster paper of first years after the WW 2 vintage. I think no one ever gets to see those bad prints any more.
Gudmundur,

Bresson's darkroom efforts were much earlier than the 40s and possibly the 30s. Much of the early gelatin silver prints made for Bresson were low contrast and flat, which may have been done to support reproduction in news journals via copy negs.

Later as printing styles and tastes changed the prints made for Bresson became more contrasty. Looking at his post WWII work, circa 1946-1949 it's obvious that film technology had evolved. Prints from that era started looking modern. Which is sort of a curious thing since Bresson described the 1930s as the decade the 19th century ended. So culturally and technologically a major change can be seen in Bresson's work after WWII.

Don