The Decisive moment
Video of the history and concepts of Henri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson approach to photography is very simple yet complex with what he liked and disliked and what he took photos of and the composition and framing of them all. He also never liked to crop his photos and colour in photos and all of his photos are candid.
Find more on this link https://www.magnumphotos.com/theory-and-practice/henri-cartier-bresson-principles-practice/
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The top middle image is the image I am going to write about. This images composition is going on the rule of thirds where the image is split into thirds and composed based on whats in those thirds and this image has people in the middle third and have nothing on the other thirds beside it which makes you focus on the people in the centre but it was not the only composition styles he did and sometimes put more than in one photo. Although the image goes on the rule of thirds the image itself is weird as the people in the photo are facing at a hung up large piece of fabric outside which is not a normal thing to do. This image also makes me feel confused and fixated as confused on what the people are doing but fixated on the composition of it. I think this image would be candid like all of his other photos but getting this kind of photo candid is a talent in itself as you are getting so close and in this case particularly as from the photographer and the people there is no one else so they must of seen him taking the photo but he ignored them looking at did it any way.
My candid photos
These photos are based on the candid photos that henri cartier-bresson took and edited them to be black and white to focus on the lines in them although I did not stop to compose them purposefully I tried to follow the composition that he would do and some of them do do that and others don't but another thing I was trying to do was try to have something close and another thing further away to have different levels of perspective on them.
This book is of him mainly taking photos on the sidewalk like to title suggests and looking at some of images it is funny confusing and disturbing in one with it showing new york city in the 90s but you also get parts of new yorks culture at the time with the fashion and actions they do, the colour in the photos is also another thing to look at with there always something in the photo that stands out even though some of these photos look pretty busy and so there is no trouble identifying the subject in these photo.
New Candid
I did take inspiration from Jeff Mermelstein and decided to take photos of the legs of people to get the individual direction they were facing the ones in a group are the better photos to for what I wanted to get but the single one I just thought was different in the composition of the photos were I ether fill the whole photo with the legs or had them centre frame. This idea is just different from what I would usually do but I wanted to see what direction in correlation in groups the direction of their legs will make.
I edited them to black and white like with the other candid photos but this time I did it to outline everything around the legs and see what directions they entail in relation to the direction of the legs.
Jeff Wall
He is a photographer that mainly does cinematography and uses colour to bring his photos together and some you can blatantly see that some are set up as the room and what the person does sometimes makes it very weird if set up as there is a photo of a kid falling of a shed and if that was set up then he told a kid to fall off of a shed on purpose which could potentially injure him. But there are some photos of his that you could not have guessed are set up like the night club one where there are just too many people to imagine that it was set up. Some are also just photographed versions of old artwork but when you get the two next to each other you get to see that Jeff wall has been very picky as he needed the two trees he needed the grass plains and he needed the wind to blow in the right direction so who knows how long it took him to actually get this photo so he could match it to this degree.
It is the meticulous process he goes through of taking photos I am not interested in the setting up of photos but the process of detail he goes into to take one. So I am thinking of carrying on with the idea of legs and I probably will take some candid photos of people but I am going to focus on going into detail having table and chair legs and seeing the details I could get with them.