I Can See it For You Wholesale

Okay, let’s a take a break from that street photography kick for a minute, and have a look at these delicious bagels that my sister made from scratch:

No earthshattering photographic insights to go along with this — just the insight that these things were tasty as hell.

Also, while I don’t consider these to be unusually exquisite examples of food photography — just snapshots really — I would much rather see images like these than the aggressively styled and lit “food as product” shots that populate the vast majority of cookbooks. Food is made in a kitchen, by human hands. Not in a light tent.

And if you want to see some photographs that are unusually exquisite examples of food photography, go read this book with photographs by this guy.

I had a minor epiphany about street photography today:

In street photography, the subject is not a person; it is a situation.

I don’t mean by this that people aren’t essential to a photograph in this genre; of course they are. But such a photograph does not become a portrait, not even an environmental portrait which works by placing the subject in a context which allows us to refine our understanding of the subject. There is an essential difference, which becomes apparent in how such are composed, what sort of moment is captured, and — perhaps essentially — the way the photographer’s gaze functions and appears.

Street photography is in this respect more like landscape photography than like portraiture. In landscape photography, every element of the composition can, potentially, have equal weight, and the subject of the landscape photograph is the sum of the parts, or the synthesis of them.

I think that effect is very much at work in Cartier-Bresson. Bresson’s photographs often display a surprising lack of interest in the particulars of the people who populate his images. Often the person appears at a great distance, or as a blur, or with their features obscured or out of focus. But Bresson has captured the shape or the motion of the person at a particular point in space or time which fits with the city or countryside around them in a why that is sublime — in much the same way as a windblown tree or a stray cloud may unite and transform a landscape.

This notion has been very helpful for me in understanding the task of composition in street photography. Composition is critical, and it takes place in four dimensions. Each conjunction of human and inhuman elements in space and time is unique and cannot be recovered after it is lost; thus, the “decisive moment” really is.

Of course, I don’t intend to present these comments as the sage remarks of a street photography wizard. (Especially not given some of the harsher things I had to say about Frank’s The Americans recently.

Hell, I’m not even past the struggle with my social reticence and ethical qualms about whipping out my camera and photographing people in their sight. I’m just thinking things out in this context because trying to explain things to someone other than oneself is often the best way to actually start getting a grip on them…

So, I went back to see the Frank and Adams-O’keefe exhibitions again. By which I mean, I went back to see Pepper No. 30 again. (I took my sister, and we also went to the farmer’s market and were otherwise productive.) Obviously these were the same exhibitions, so I don’t have any fundamentally new material…although I’m feeling more definite about my sense that there’s something off about Frank’s photographs of black people.

For example, compare the photographs he made of a Spanish funeral to those he made of a black funeral in the American south, and think about his position in those situations. In the Spanish photographs, he’s at a distance that seems appropriate; at the black funeral, he appears to have no qualms about invading personal space, as my sister put it. Which says a lot about how he felt about those people. Reminds me somewhat of a recent thread on flickr which touched on how a lot of photographers seem to have no problem photographing homeless people when they would think twice about photographing others. It seems to have something to do with different perceptions of people’s reality as human beings.

The captions, as usual, don’t help at all. There’s a photograph (google it) of a black nurse holding a white baby, and the baby is described in the caption as looking determined, which is accurate, but the nurse is described as appearing stoic, when in fact, her main expression is actually a small smile. I don’t know whether this suggests that the captioner has a problem “reading” black faces, or whether the difficulty is that he or she presumed the nurse must be a stoic person, (and in all likelihood she was a stoic person), and stopped there, before looking to see if the actual woman as photographed matched this expectation? Whatever the case, there was a distinct failure to see.

Which is pretty significant when you consider that the person who captioned that photograph is responsible for helping thousands or hundreds of thousands of people in at least three cities understand what that photograph means.