regardingthestreet

“It’s seldom you make a great picture. You have to milk the cow quite a lot and get plenty milk to make a little cheese. Hmm?”

From the short film—really an audio recording—Cornell Capa made of Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1973.

Quality doesn’t mean deep blacks and whatever tonal range. That’s not quality, that’s a kind of quality. The pictures of Robert Frank might strike someone as being sloppy—the tone range isn’t right and things like that—but they’re far superior to the pictures of Ansel Adams with regard to quality, because the quality of Ansel Adams, if I may say so, is essentially the quality of a postcard. But the quality of Robert Frank is a quality that has something to do with what he’s doing, what his mind is. It’s not balancing out the sky to the sand and so forth. It’s got to do with intention.

[BJ] “Talking of bad photographers, I have often heard it said that one of their characteristics is that they look at their contacts in order to discover which is the best picture, whereas a good photographer examines each frame on a contact sheet and asks: why is this one not a good picture?

And then there is the other way of working that thrills me, where all of the people are subjects of the shot, at once, and supporting the same ‘story’ or ‘message’ or whatever you are processing in your mind and want to give shape to. The ones ive taken have normally happened the same way, you see a overall scene with potential, you will find people who can support the main weight of the picture, (because you find them interesting, or meaningful, because they are more predictable) so you compose the picture according to these ‘pillars’ who will do more or less the same while you continue including people and situations in the shot. Fixing point by point (or combining articulation by articulation) in your construction by predicting more or less the action you can expect in each one of them. Sometimes you have to work with few fixed variables and most of your composition depending on luck, other times you get to work with more or less fixed and predictable variables.

It’s the other way round. The people Frank was photographing didn’t like him. That’s completely different. People like Frank and the good street photographers antagonised their subjects just because of who they where - that’s why they got all those good pictures of people staring at them looking antagonised. The meaning of good street photography is people looking pissed off. Isn’t that why you like Mark Cohen and Bruce Gilden so much. The whimsical shit with happy people is just whimsical shit. Unless it’s Winogrand, then it’s not whimsy.