Henri Cartier Bresson

I liked how in the documentary Henri Cartier Bresson gave honest insight into how he takes his photos and the luck/chance behind each some of his best photos. Of course, he has an excellent eye and is always on the lookout ready to capture a perfect scene or portrait, but he does reveal either explicitly or implicitly (when he acknowledges that some photos would have been better if some object had been moved or some person had been in a different place) that some of his photos were very much a luck of the draw. He does also make it fairly clear what gives some of his photos their uniqueness and I like his comment on how he prioritizes form over lighting, where lighting is simply a perfume to the photo.

Amélie and the Subjectivity of Photography

Although this is not a particular scene and more of a motif throughout the movie, I really like the way they touched on the subjectivity of photography. For almost the entire movie, you are under the impression that the mysterious bald man is possibly a killer or at least a very weird character who for some reason feels the need to take pictures at every photo booth. It’s further corroborated by the fact that his pictures from the photobooth look somewhat haunting and malicious. This coupled with the stories/theories that Amélie makes up for him really paint him in a strange light. Finally, at the end of the movie, you find out that he was really just a repairman for the photo booths and it really wasn’t strange at all for him to be taking pictures at the photo booths.

I think the subjectivity of photographs is explored as well in Amélie’s mystery poster photographs that she leaves for Nino. She leaves somewhat suggestive photographs for him, which sort of make him assume certain things about Amélie like her desire to be with him. I think throughout the movie, they’re demonstrating all the stories you can gather from a simple photograph that at a glance doesn’t necessarily say much. Whether these stories are true or not, it shows how much is up to the interpretation of the viewer.

Response to Baudelaire and Lens Culture

I found that both the small article on lens culture and Baudelaire’s commentary of then-modern photography touched on the idea of how we believe and perceive what comes to us through a lens. It is also interesting how the evolution of the acceptance of an image seen through a lens. At first people did not accept it so much, dubious about the images it was producing because it contradicted the things that they previously believed (Galileo’s time). Baudelaire’s commentary indirectly indicates that at some point, photographs were so real that it was destroying the world of art because it left little to the imagination. And now, we are back to a point where the art of photography has developed enough that you cannot necessarily trust the contents of a photograph or we at least know that a photograph can be staged/framed a certain way to hide or emphasize a certain scene.

 

I also found Baudelaire’s commentary particularly interesting because I felt like it embodied the (bad) mentality that art should stay the way it is and should be reserved to a certain style and certain audience (particularly one of higher class). I think the commentary epitomized a resistance to evolution; painting had been a fine art back then, more focused on the artist’s ability to paint realistically, knowing how to mimic reality, whereas the introduction of photography quickly eliminated the ‘need’ for these skills. This probably provoked a new style of painting where technique was still important but the focus was now on what could be imagined, and only what could be imagined, rather than simply a scene from something someone could see in real life.

Iconic Photos

According to the dictionary an icon is a person or thing regarded as representative of something else, but I think that there are some connotations missing from that definition. I feel like an iconic photograph more than just represents a time/theme, but can really evoke certain emotions or feelings in its audience that are tied to the subject/what the photo represents. Moreover it should really capture the essence of an entire event even though it is only one frame. For example, while they may not be iconic, there are plenty of photos of performers that might only show a single snapshot in time of a performance, but as a whole summarize the energy with which the performer performed or the enthusiasm of the crowd throughout the performance. What would make that photo iconic is if the performance was one of the best of all time or a major event in history (e.g. Hendrix at Woodstock).

 

For my iconic photo, I chose a picture of Kobe Bryant standing on top of a table in front of the home crowd right after he and the Lakers had won a championship (this was Kobe’s fifth championship). Kobe is a very talented player and possessed a lot of skill, but he is probably most known for his sheer “greatness.” Sometimes it’s hard for me to explain what greatness is relative to sports, but I think if anything the picture is so iconic and so representative of Kobe and his greatness that it does a better job of explaining it just as is. The scene of one person looking into a crowd of thousands of people all celebrating his work makes this sort of unreal level of accomplishment more tangible. Even someone who knew very little about basketball could see that Kobe was truly a great (and not just very good) player and that sort of universal message is key to a photo being iconic.

Susan Sontag Plato’s Cave Response

I like the chapter because I think it does a good job of acting as if the art of photography is a perfectly objective art since technically a photograph is just a still frame of reality, but then talks more deeply about how photography is much more subjective in the sense that the photographer is at almost complete freedom to dictate what his/her audience will see in the photograph. The paragraph where she talks about the photographers of the Great Depression in the 30s who took tons of pictures of one of their subjects just to ensure that they had at least one good picture is both interesting and disappointing to me. It’s cool in that it shows that the photographer knew in advance what they wanted the picture to look like and kept shooting until they thought they saw the face they needed for their photograph. However, it’s disappointing because, at least I, always romanticized great/iconic pictures as amazing coincidences where the subject was in the perfect pose just as the photographer shot the picture. Knowing that these pictures were by-and-large staged is sort of a let down.

I also felt like there was a negative tone towards what the ‘culture’ of photography had become (especially in the West) and that the complete democratization of the camera required a separation between photography as an art and people just taking pictures. While there are obvious examples of people taking pictures just to take pictures, at what point does taking a picture no longer become art? Just because somebody uses only their phone to take pictures and for the sole purpose of sharing it on Instagram, does it render their photos non-art? Finally, if there are clear cut boundaries for what photography can be considered art and what cannot, at what point was photography as an art created; at what point did people start practicing photography as an art?

William Klein Documentary Response

I really liked the photograph of the boy pointing the gun towards the camera because of how natural/un-staged it looked. While I believe that it was staged in at least the sense that Klein had the boy point the gun towards the camera (also, in the documentary they show the attempts at this photo that didn’t make it that sort of show different positions the boy was in), the boy’s face in this photo still very much looks like a boy playing with a gun, pretending to aim it at a target. This element of authenticity is definitely what makes Klein’s photos so revolutionary and also compelling. I’m sure that this was a very new idea back when Klein first started doing these types of photographs, but one can definitely still see the influence it has had in photography today and art in general (where being candid and raw emotions are very common—it’s almost as if it is its own aesthetic).

With that being said, I find street photography, especially that where people are the main subjects of the photos, can be very polarizing. On one hand, it can do some good by raising awareness of certain living conditions that have to be seen to be believed or simply raise awareness of a culture that is under-represented. Sometimes, the photographs simply just look cool. But at the same time, I feel like a lot of this photography is done with poor/oppressed people as the subjects (Klein went to Harlem to take many of his photos), and it is sometimes difficult to draw the line between showing people in a certain light through art (already a bit taboo) and exploiting people for the sake of art. Klein himself alluded to it a little in the documentary when he recalls people’s discomfort with having a white man walk through Harlem (a predominantly (poor) black neighborhood). While I think that Klein’s photography was done well and did not really exploit his subjects, I feel like it birthed a style of photography that has little regard for its subjects and is simply framing people a certain way for the sake of having a certain look.