I have noticed that some photographers, who are obviously trying to do some street photography, position themselves at a busy corner or big square and wait there for the things to happen. Mostly they are the “shoot from a distance” type. Maybe they have just found a spot where the light is beautiful, or they like the background and now want something to fill the foreground. I’m not convinced that works out well, it is like deciding for yourself “today I want to take a photograph that expresses this or that”. If you move around it’s easier to remain open and attentive, you can get into a “rhythm”, there are more chances and you develop a certain intuition for hot spots where “things happen”.
I spoke to Robert Doisneau only once. On the phone. I was photographing in Paris at the time and I happened to find a few old prints of him. When I told him he wanted to know which ones, and commented that they were possibly used for one of his books. When I told him that I was a photographer myself he asked what my subject was, and when I said, people mainly, the conversation became even more personal. At the time he was at home a lot, taking care of his wife who was terminally ill and he probably did very little photography. He really took the time to talk about photography; then wanted to know what I liked best of his work and to my surprise suggested the humorous photographs and the series of the man with the cello, which I knew, but never liked. He said he hoped he had made people happy with his photographs. I felt like he was testing me, but politely answered, I liked those categories “pas tellement” (not so much), quickly adding that of the books he made “La Banlieue de Paris” (with the beautiful text by Blaise Cendrars about the impoverished Paris suburbs of 1949) was my all-time favorite. There was a silence, of surprise maybe, then his friendly voice, “mais c’est si triste!…” (but that’s so sad…) The only reason – and it felt almost like an excuse – that I could think of, was that I grew up in a suburb myself and I was touched by the atmosphere. He liked that.
“The compelling clarity with which a photograph recorded the trivial suggested that the subject had never before been properly seen, that it was in fact perhaps not trivial, but filled with undiscovered meaning. If photographs could not be read as stories, they could be read as symbols. […..] The great war photographer Robert Capa expressed both the narrative poverty and the symbolic power of photography when he said, “If your pictures aren’t good, you’re not close enough.”
John Szarkowski “The Photographer’s Eye” (Museum of Modern Art © 1966)
I own this photobook “Italia” by Guido Piovene (ed. Carlo Bestetti, Roma, 1955) with rather nice black and white photographs, of which I recognized a few rightaway. Where or when I bought it I don’t remember. I looked at the index…Alinari, Bischof, Cartier & Bresson…..Cartier & Bresson ??… was he still so unknown then that they took his name to be a cooperation between 2 different photographers ?
I think of Robert Frank (bless his somber spells – I adore his work!) who was quoted to have remarked: “So I’m famous, now what…” So what indeed. “On…” Samuel Beckett would have remarked. Now there’s another genius for you. But who’s reading his books nowadays (and I don’t mean Waiting for Godot). Well, there’s me, for one.
When I started taking photographs, ages ago, Henri Cartier-Bresson was the photographers’ pope so to speak. He had three dogmas for the believers, I had understood from reading the photo magazines and his own books (fortunately my French was not too bad):
first, there is a “decisive moment” for the photograph to be taken. Up to a point, there is certainly some truth in it, but some indecisive moments will do very well, I have meanwhile discovered. And it’s so irritating that every nitwit art critic with some general interest, preoccupied with knowledge but not even looking, comes up with this term to show he “knows about photography too”, even if there is no use for it.
second, you always used the whole negative, and sometimes even proudly showed you did so by including a subtle black border around the image on the paper print. There were even “styles” in the shaping of the outside of the border – some photographers used hand-torn carton frames to replace the narrow and sharp-edged metal frames that went with the enlarger. I even understood that Diane Arbus photographs (mostly posthumous prints) can be categorized and dated by their treatment of the image edge, soft without black border, narrow black border, uneven borders etc.
third, and here comes the f….word, you should never use flash, Cartier-Bresson said, since it was “intolerably aggressive”, destroying the atmosphere, making the presence of the intruding photographer very obvious, and in fact, changing the whole action. That’s what he said and I was not unhappy to have an excuse not to use it for I did not have a lot of experience with it.
Then came house parties. I had done little work with flash and felt insecure about it. I had an electronic flash unit that was basic, but clumsy. Its head turned when I brushed against somebody’s shoulder and people froze like wild animals caught in car lights because it was blinding. This had to change. I bought two identical dedicated Nikon speedlights, since I worked with two identical cameras as well. Using also identical settings was the ideal solution. I soon found out after experimenting on a few films what the best combination of depth of field/stepped down lighting was. I had given up the idea of using the room lights, as there were unworkable extremes and strobes and lots of darkness, which did not go well with the detail that I strived for; I wanted to fill the frame with relevant information till it almost burst. Flash made it all possible.That is how I overcame my initial fear of flashlight. I know I can use it for my kind of photography whenever I feel the need for it. Certainly in a house club with all its moving and pulsating lights no one will object either.
Heard on WDR German t.v. (about the picturesque town of Monschau): “If cameras had a motif alarm, this town would have a serious noise problem.” That’s one way to put it.
With the addition of three more series today my website has come fullsize, though ready for more. The number of photographs shown has risen to 123 now, so it’s a more varied look at my work, and since the boundaries between subjects are not strict, you will already get glimpses of other subjects yet to come. So keep coming back for more, and for now have a look at the newly uploaded photoseries Paris, periphery (of The Hague) and Egypt on www.tomstappers.com ! Accompanying texts on this blog.
“In photography the formal issue might be stated as this: How much of the camera’s miraculous descriptive power is the photographer capable of handling?”
(John Szarkowski about a Garry Winogrand photograph in “Looking at Photographs” ©1973, MoMA)
I’ve just been selecting photographs from the following series: Paris (1970’s-1990’s), Egypt ( January-February 1989) and Periphery ( June-November 1991). Only “Periphery”, an assignment by the town of The Hague where I grew up on the eastern town border (autobiographical), was on my former website already, although the selection may be slightly different. The other two are new on the net. There’s more to come, e.g. gypsies, tattoo, jazz musicians, London, Barcelona and other cities… If you want to buy a personal favorite from these added or earlier photographs for your collection (reasonably priced signed gelatin silver prints 30×40 cm.), be welcome to email me. The 3 current series have been scanned and will be uploaded to my photosite www.tomstappers.com in the next few days, probably soon after Easter. Do visit, I think they’re interesting allright, and keep an eye on this blog. I will comment on my photography in several more posts to come!
“Winogrand has made chaos clearly visible; he has disciplined it without breaking its spirit. It is not supremely difficult to make a clear picture of a truism, and it is easier still to hold up a mirror to the maelstrom and call it art. But to see and set down with acuity the flickering meanings that illuminate the menagerie we perform in – this is a creative miracle.”
© John Szarkowski (1925-2007), former curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, in his Afterword to “The Animals” (MoMA 1969); great mind, a master of language and one of the few real connoisseurs of photography- he taught us all because he understood…