In his six decade career, Penn was able to combine the precision of seeing with the invention of form.

Penn was not only an exceptional portraitist and a master of still life, but he was also a great innovator of fashion photography.

His fashion work bridged the gap between art and commerce and helped redefine the language of fashion photography in the process.

He shot a remarkable 165 cover photos for Vogue over sixty years – making him the most prolific photographer in the magazine’s history.

He was one of the first photographers to shoot against a simple plain background – a technique that is now used in every studio around the world.

Penn’s ability to use light, shadow, and space to produce still lifes and portraits that are both evocative and provocative is masterful.

In this article, we’ll be taking a closer look at the work of one of the great masters of twentieth-century photography, Mr. Irving Penn.

Related: 30 Brilliant Irving Penn Quotes to Bookmark

Editor note: If you find our Irving Penn profile helpful then we would be grateful if you could share it with others. Thanks for your continued support.

A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart, leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.

Irving Penn

Irving Penn Biography

Name: Irving Penn
Nationality: American
Genre: Portrait, Fashion, Nudes, Still-life, Advertising, Travel
Born: 16 June 1917 – Plainfield, New Jersey
Died: 7 October 2009 (92 years old)

Early Career

Penn started his career as a designer before transitioning across to photography. He studied under Alexey Brodovitch at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts, Philadelphia) from 1934 to 1938.

Brodovitch recognized Penn’s talent and invited him to work at Harper’s Bazaar on some design projects during school vacations.

After graduating, Penn worked as a freelance designer in New York from 1938 to 1940. During this time, he purchased his first camera, a Rolleiflex, and wandered the streets of New York on weekends taking photographs. A few of his early images were printed as illustrations in Harper’s Bazaar.

From 1940 and 1941 he worked as an advertising designer for the Saks Fifth Avenue department store. However, the young Penn wished to explore the world and decided to head to Mexico in 1941. He traveled by train, on short trips across the southern United States.

In Mexico, Penn painted for a year in a studio in Coyoacán, a suburb of Mexico City, and took photographs. Dissatisfied with his paintings, though, he destroyed them and returned to New York.

Irving Penn and Vogue

In 1943, Penn was hired by Alexander Liberman, the art director of Vogue, as his assistant. Liberman recognized Penn’s photographic talent and urged him to pursue a career in photography.

Penn’s first cover, an elegant still-life, appeared in the October 1943 edition of the magazine. Penn would eventually photograph 165 covers for Vogue over sixty years.

During the war years, Penn served as an ambulance driver and photographer in the American Field Service with the British Army in India and Italy.

In 1948, following a photographic assignment for Vogue in Peru, Penn stayed behind to spend Christmas in the historic city of Cuzco. There he photographed the indigenous peoples, creating works that are simultaneously still-life’s and portraits.

Between Vogue assignments, Penn continued to experiment with his work. In 1949, he began photographing the female nude and created prints using a complex bleaching technique for the first time.

Penn married fashion model and muse Lisa Fonssagrives in 1950. His photographs of her frequently show her slim elegance, placed in the center of the frame with few props.

Finding his Style

Penn also worked on a series of “small trades” people. For the project, he visited New York, Paris, and London and photographed unrecognized tradespeople including young butchers, a coalman, a telegraph messenger, pastry cooks, and even a balloon seller, all posing formally in their work clothes and holding the tools of their trade.

It was this series that saw the genesis of what was to become characteristic of his portrait style: subjects posed against a plain background. He also placed his subjects in corner of the frame and lighted subjects from the side.

In the late ’60s, Penn put together a traveling studio for a series of ethnographic essays for Vogue. From 1967 to 1971, he traveled to Dahomey, Cameroon, Nepal, Morocco, and New Guinea. 

Penn used his signature style – plain background and a single source light – to photograph these ethnographic images, resulting in a unique body of work that looked completely different from anything seen before.

Penn’s mastery of still life and ability to transform everyday objects to the realm of art was particularly seen in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1977. The museum exhibited photographs of twisted paper, a paper cup, and cigarette butts, which Penn printed using platinum paper.

Throughout his career, Penn photographed celebrities, politicians, and artists, including Alfred Hitchcock, Audrey Hepburn, Pablo Picasso, Grace Kelly, Henry Kissinger, Gore Vidal, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Yves St. Laurent.

Mature Period and Legacy

Penn’s creativity flourished during the last decades of his life. His studio in New York continued to be busy with advertising, magazine and personal work, as well as exhibition and print projects.

His innovative portraits, still life, fashion, and beauty photographs continued to appear in Vogue right up until the end of his life.

After the death of Lisa in 1992, Penn found solace in his work and in the structure of his studio schedule, and he would paint in his spare time. In 1997, he donated prints and archival material to the Art Institute of Chicago.

In 2009, Penn died in New York, at the age of 92. During his lifetime, he established The Irving Penn Foundation and published several books including Moments Preserved (1960), Passage (1991), Still Life (2001), and A Notebook at Random (2004)

His work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and many more galleries. He was represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York City.

Photography Style

• Master of studio photography
• Less is more, simplification and elimination
• Capturing authenticity
• Use of plain background, single color or theatre curtain
• Black and white for portraiture
• Color for beauty and still-life
• Use of conventional north light (single source sidelight: either natural, tungsten or strobe) 
• High contrast printing, a strong play between dark and light

Irving Penn worked across a variety of genres throughout his long career. In the next section, we’ll try to breakdown each genre and Penn’s working methods in more detail.

The greatest privilege I’ve had in photography is a change of diet.

Irving Penn

Portraiture

Penn’s distinctive style came from shooting his subjects in the studio and taking them out of their natural environment.

His subjects were posed against a plain background, typically a theater curtain found in Paris that he kept in his studio throughout his career.

Subjects are lighted from the side from either by window light or a single light source that is used to replicate the look of Penn’s favored northern light (see lighting section below.)

He applied the same approach whether he was photographing aborigine tribesmen, movie stars, or even the Hells Angels.

In portrait photography, there is something more profound that we seek inside a person while being painfully aware that a limitation of our medium is that the inside is recordable only insofar as is apparent on the outside.

Irving Penn

In the 1940s, Penn placed his sitters in a narrow corner space, which was created by angling two-stage flats to touch along their vertical edges. The set, both physically and psychologically confined the sitters, resulting in unique portraits.

Finding his Portrait Style

A decade later, Irving Penn adopted a new direct, close-up approach to photographing subjects. He used the same backdrop for all his portraits. He was a big believer in “simplification and elimination.”

Penn wanted his portraits to be both complete and profound, like the works of painters Goya, Daumier, and Toulouse-Lautrec who he greatly admired.

I feed on art more than I ever do on photographs. I can admire photography, but I wouldn’t go to it out of hunger.

Irving Penn

The reason Penn used a simple background was to isolate his subjects, so the images were free from distraction and surplus information. This allowed the viewer to concentrate on the subject and the subject only.

This may be the reason the majority of his portraits are black and white, as color tends to add another element within the frame that could potentially distract the viewer.

Sensitive people faced with the prospect of a camera portrait put on a face they think is the one they would like to show the world. Very often what lies behind the façade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe.

Irving Penn

Fashion

Instead of shooting on location or using elaborate props like many early fashion photographers, Penn instead drew attention to the clothing and accessories and photographed models, as he did with his portraiture, isolated against simple backdrops.

Make things manageable enough to record them, to prune away anything inconsequential… Because less is more.

Irving Penn

As one of the first photographers to emphasize style over context, he helped to revolutionize the genre of fashion photography.

A fashion picture is a portrait just as a portrait is a fashion picture.

Irving Penn

Penn was infamous for making his models repeat the same gesture, movement, or position for an entire morning. When his models showed signs of fatigue, he would then get down to business.

I am going to find what is permanent in this face. Truth comes with fatigue. He displays himself just as he is, just as he did not want to look.

He was also known to take a lot of photographs – sometimes over a hundred rolls per photoshoot. His assistants were certainly kept busy.

It should also be noted that his studio was a calm and professional place of work – Penn was an artist painting with light. He had already sketched out the idea, had the image he wanted in his head, and now had to mount the image on film.

Former Vogue Editor-in-Chief Diana Vreeland once said: “Irving Penn’s studio is like a cathedral. David Bailey’s studio is like a nightclub.”

Nudes

Penn began photographing nudes in 1949 about the same time his career as a fashion photographer was established. His approach to nudes was completely different from his commercial work though.

He devised a technique of bleaching and re-developing each print to create high contrast areas that enhance the texture and volume of the image.

In terms of the images, his models are positioned either seated or lying down, and they are mostly tightly framed. He also used a lot of top light. There is a mysterious quality to his nude images, which makes them incredibly powerful.

Still Life

Penn’s fascination with still life is evident in the dramatic range of photography he has produced in this genre.

His first assignment as a Vogue studio photographer was a still-life cover, and over the years he completed many striking still-life product shots.

Penn began taking still-life photos of flowers in the 1960s. This led to a book of floral studies, Flowers, published in 1980. He said he was drawn to flowers considerably “after they’ve passed the point of perfection.”

In the 1970s, Penn continued the theme of visual imperfection and produced a series of still-life’s using memento mori objects (a reminder of the inevitability of death) such as cigarette butts, old clothing, and decaying fruit and vegetables.

He successfully challenged the traditional idea of what we consider beautiful, giving common street trash the full studio treatment. Ironically, these photographs are the antithesis of the consumer products Penn shot commercially.

Photographing a cake can be art too.

Irving Penn

What Camera Did Irving Penn Use?

• Rolleiflex
• Deardorff Large format view (4-by-5-inch and 8-by-10-inch models)
• Leica
• Nikon F
• Banquet Large Format

Penn purchased his first camera, a twin-lens medium format Rolleiflex around 1938 after graduating. He continued to use the same model right until the end of his career, some sixty years later.

For his studio work for Vogue, Penn frequently used a Deardorff large format view camera (both the 4×5 and 8×10 models).

Penn began using a 35mm Leica camera for his travel assignments for Vogue in 1950.

In the late 1950s, Penn switched from Leica to a Nikon, trading the rangefinder-style Leica camera for the newer single-lens reflex design and the telephoto lens.

In a burst of romantic passion for this new apparatus (forgetting gratitude to the Leica and with even a certain amount of disloyalty) I diverted myself of all our studios elaborate and superb Leica equipment, taking a terrible financial beating in the process, not finding a panacea and exchanging one set of headaches for another.

Irving Penn

Penn would later come to appreciate the flexibility of the new system and continue to use it for the rest of his career.

In 1979, Penn picked up a Banquet camera, a large format view camera, that was popular in the early twentieth century for taking group portraits in formal situations.

What Film Did Penn Use?

Penn mainly used Kodak black and white film for his portraits, either Super XX, Plus-X, or Tri-X (it seems any Kodak film with an X). For his fashion, beauty, and still-life photography he preferred to use color film.

After looking at my notes and reviewing his contact sheets it looks like he used both Fuji and Kodak for his color work. For his later studio photography, he used Kodak Ektachrome E200 slide-film.

In his book, World’s in a Small Room, Penn states that most of his photography in the book was shot on Kodak Tri-X and exposed at 160 ASA, or 80 to 125 ASA for very dark skins. Development was usually in Ethol UFG for 3 to 5 minutes at 68F.

Irving Penn Lighting Technique

Penn’s lighting would change depending on what genre of photography he was shooting and the location.

Below I’m going to try and cover Penn’s portrait lighting in detail (or as best as I can). His fashion photography would require another article.

Whenever possible, Penn would try and use natural north light, which is also favored by artists. This makes sense as he was heavily influenced by painters.

I share with many people the feeling that there is a sweetness and constancy to light that falls into a studio from the north sky that sets it beyond any other illumination. It is a light of such penetrating clarity that even a simple object lying by chance in such a light takes on an inner glow, almost a voluptuousness.

Irving Penn

In many of his pictures, the lighting is fairly directional and comes from one side, which creates a dramatic fall-off across the frame.

Penn makes everything extremely hard for himself. He employs no gadgets, no special props, nothing but the simplest lighting – probably a one-source light coming from the side of the sitter’s head.

Cecil Beaton, writing in 1975

Lighting Method

To achieve this, he used either window light or his portable studio. In his studio, he had floor to ceiling glass and large skylights installed.

If the light wasn’t strong enough (or there wasn’t any window light available) then he would augment the existing light or replicate window light with either tungsten, strobes, and even cheap hardware clamp lights. Whatever got the job done and gave him the quality of light he needed.

In my windowless New York studio, I designed a bank of tungsten to more or less simulate a skylight. The bank was constructed in a metal frame moved by hand pulley on a ceiling track. I found this to be an agreeable light for the formalized arrangements of people and still-life’s I meant to photograph. A drawback of course was the considerable heat of the bulbs and the long exposure times required. For still life’s, exposures could sometimes be hours long.

Irving Penn

Penn began experimenting with strobe lighting as early as 1952 when he was first introduced to the technology by colleague Leslie Gill.

He also used scrims, flags, drapes, mirrors, umbrellas, and reflectors to shape and control the light.

Editor note: If you have anything further you wish to add, specifically to do with Penn’s technique (lighting, printing, etc) then send us an email so we can update the article.

Platinum Printing Process

In 1964, Penn used the platinum/palladium printing process for the first time – a printing technique that was popular at the turn of the century.

The process involved applying platinum rather than silver on the printing paper. He would then expose and develop the negative then repeat until satisfied with the print.

After he perfected the technique, Penn went back and reprinted a lot of his earlier work.

Sometime in 1964, I realized that I was a victim of a printmaking obsession, a condition that persists today.

Irving Penn

Here is a short video from his former assistant that explains the technique:

Other Resources

Recommended Irving Penn Books

Disclaimer: Photogpedia is an Amazon Associate and earns from qualifying purchases.

• Irving Penn: Centennial
• Passage
• A Career in Photography

Irving Penn Videos

On Location in Morocco, 1971

The Portraits of Irving Penn – The Art of Photography

Irving Penn Photos

Looking for more Irving Penn photos? Then head over to the Irving Penn archive and The Met Museum.

Further Reading

Alexey Brodovitch Workshop Transcript – Conversation between Richard Avedon and Irving Penn from 1964 session. The legendary photographers discuss their photography style, projects, and commercial work.

Irving Penn Notebook – Copy of Penn’s notebook. Despite being difficult to read, it’s worth printing to help understand his process better.

The Art Institute of Chicago: Irving Penn Archives – Lots of great information about the master photographer that you won’t find anywhere else.

Fact Check

With every Photographer profile article, we strive to be accurate and fair. If you see something that doesn’t look right, then contact us and we’ll update the post.

If there is anything else you would like to add about Irving Penn’s work then send us an email: hello(at)photogpedia.com

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Related Articles

• Richard Avedon: The Million Dollar Man
• Yousuf Karsh: The Master of Portrait Photography
• Horst P Horst: The Photographer of Style

Sources

Irving Penn is Difficult, Can’t you Tell, New York Times, 1991
Obituary, The Guardian, 2009
Irving Penn: Small Trades , The J Paul Getty Museum, 2009
Centennial, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017
Irving Penn at the Met, Vogue, 2017
How Irving Penn ‘changed the way people saw the world, Christies, 2020
Celebrating the work of Irving Penn, The Guardian, January 2021

The Irving Penn Foundation
Irving Penn Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago

Richard Avedon and Irving Penn Workshop Transcript, 1964
Passage, Knopf, 1991
A Career in Photography, Bullfinch, 1997
Irving Penn: Centennial, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017
Encyclopedia of Twentieth-century Photography, Routledge, 2005

The post Irving Penn: In Pursuit of Perfection appeared first on Photogpedia.

Cameron’s work was controversial in her own time. Criticized for her so-called bad technique, she ignored convention and experimented with composition and focus. 

Cameron is credited with creating the first photographic close-up portraits and influencing the use of diffused focus.

Her photographs of famous Victorians have been described as some of the finest portraits of the nineteenth century in any medium.

She was also one of the first photographers to produce staged photographs, posing her sitters – friends, family and house servants – as characters from literary, mythology, religion and history.

Cameron had a short but prolific career as a photographer. She took up the camera at age forty-eight and made over 1200 photographs over fourteen years.

She was one of the first photographers to realize how human emotion could be further emphasized through lighting effects, selective focus and framing. 

Largely self-taught, she made photographs that were intended to transcend appearance and speak directly to the human spirit. Today she is celebrated as one of the pioneering portrait photographers.

In this article, we will aim to provide an introduction to Cameron’s work, with particular emphasis on her photography style and innovative working methods. 

Related: 25 Timeless Julia Margaret Cameron Quotes to Bookmark

Editor note: If you enjoy our Julia Margaret Cameron profile, then we would be grateful if you could share it with others through your blog, website, forums or social media.

About Julia Margaret Cameron

Name: Julia Margaret Cameron (born Pattle)
Nationality: British
Genre: Portrait, Conceptual, Fine Art
Born: 11 June 1815 – Calcutta, India
Died: 26 January 1879 (63 years) – Kalutara, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka)

Julia Margaret Cameron Biography 

Julia Margaret Pattle was born in Calcutta, India, to James Pattle, an Englishman and his French wife, Thérèse l’Etang. At a young age, Julia and her six sisters were sent to Europe, spending most of their childhood with their grandmother in Paris and Versailles. 

In 1936, while recovering from illness in South Africa, Julia Margaret met Charles Hay Cameron, an important figure in the British administration of India, and a man twenty years her senior. The couple married two years later in Calcutta.

During the same stay, she met the astronomer and scientist Sir John Herschel. He was probably the first person to introduce Cameron to photographic processes and is the subject of some of her best portraits. Herschel would become a life-long friend, mentor and supporter of her work. 

Editor note: Sir John Herschel was the inventor of the cyanotype print and is credited as being the first person to use the word photography in 1839.

For the next ten years, the Cameron’s lived in India and were highly respected and active in colonial politics and society. Julia was kept busy running the home, looking after the children, and hosting social gatherings.

Moving to England

In 1848, Charles retired, and the Cameron’s moved to London. Several of the Pattle sisters had married and settled in London and the Camerons’ two eldest children, were sent to England to be educated. 

Julia’s sister, Sarah Prinsep, had a house in Kensington and was visited regularly by some of the most important literary and artistic figures.

In 1860, the Cameron family purchased two cottages in Freshwater, a village on the Isle of Wight, located on the south coast of England, close to the estate of Alfred Lord Tennyson. 

The Cameron’s named their new home Dimbola Lodge and it was here where Cameron began her photography journey.

During this period, Freshwater became something of a focal point for artists, writers, and intellectuals, who gathered at the Tennyson and the Cameron residencies. 

Dimbola was ideally located ten minutes up from Freshwater Bay and half a mile from Farringford, the home of the Tennyson family.

Freshwater in the 1860s and 1870s was unique, for not only was it an enchanting place in itself with high downs, glorious views of the English Channel and air “worth sixpence a pint” as Tennyson wrote to a friend, but a delightful company of people had come to live there to be near their friend Tennyson.  

Anne Thackery

This area on the west side of the Island, known for its celebrity circle, has since been named, “The Tennyson Mile.”

Photography Journey

In December 1863, when Charles was away in Ceylon, visiting the family’s coffee plantations, Cameron, who by now was forty-eight, was given a camera by her eldest daughter Julia, “It may amuse you, Mother, to try to photograph during your solitude at Freshwater.” 

There is evidence that Cameron had taken a few photographs before this or at least experimented with printing negatives. She wrote to Herschel and said that the painter David Wilkie Wynfield, who took a series of photos of his fellow painters in fancy dress in the early 1860s, had given her a lesson.

It also seems likely that her daughter wouldn’t have given her a cumbersome 11″×9″ camera, with accompanying chemicals and accessories, unless she had shown some interest in the subject.

Cameron herself dated the start of her photography work from the acquisition of the camera.

Early Experiments

Setting up a darkroom in the coal store and converting an old glass-enclosed chicken house to a studio, Julia set about experimenting with the medium. She described her first days working in photography as a process of trial and error: 

Many and many a week in the year 1864, I worked fruitlessly, but not hopelessly… I began with no knowledge of the art. I did not know where to place my dark box, how to focus my sitter, and my first picture I effaced to my consternation by rubbing my hand over the filmy side of the glass.

Julia Margaret Cameron – Annals of My Glass House

Cameron worked tirelessly to understand and master the steps needed to produce negatives with wet collodion on glass plates. In a letter to Sir John Herschel in 1864, she described her initial struggle: 

At the beginning of this year, I took up photography, and set to work alone and unassisted. I felt my way literally in the dark through endless failures, and last came endless successes!

Her first success came in 1864, with a portrait of Annie Philpot, the daughter of her neighbor. 

During this time, she was supported by her long-suffering family, which she writes about in her book: 

Personal sympathy has helped me on very much. My husband from first to last has watched every picture with delight, and it is my daily habit to run to him with every glass upon which a fresh glory is newly stamped, and to listen to his enthusiastic applause. This habit of running into the dining-room with my wet pictures has stained such an immense quantity of table linen with nitrate of silver, indelible stains, that I should have been banished from any less indulgent household…

Photography Career

Cameron may have begun as an amateur, with no interest in earning money from her new hobby, but that soon changed and she quickly adopted a professional approach to her work by copyrighting, exhibiting, and selling prints. 

Within 18 months she had sold photographs to the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), set up a second studio inside the family home, and arranged for a London based firm to publish and sell her prints.

That being said, Cameron had no interest in pursuing a career as a commercial portrait photographer. She was more interested in experimentation and photography as art. Cameron practiced photography on her own terms. 

With the help of friends, family members, and her household staff, Cameron used photography as a means of illustrating a mixture of historical, artistic and literary themes. 

For one of her tableau’s, a housemaid might be transformed into a Madonna, or her husband with his bushy grey beard into Merlin, or her neighbor’s young child into an angel.

The two main sources of her work were the allegorical teachings from the bible and early renaissance art.  

Cameron also took portrait photographs of Victorian celebrities, many of whom were close family friends, including Charles Darwin, Alfred Tennyson, and John Herschel.

Critics and Awards

Like many people ahead of their time, Cameron had her fair share of critics. The photographic establishment found fault with her supposedly poor technique: leaving smudges, printing from cracked negatives and her “out of focus” effects. 

Yet, she received several awards from overseas, including a gold medal at Berlin in 1866, as well as honorable mentions at international exhibitions. Her photography was also greatly admired by artists – a view which is shared by art critics today, who praise her for putting beauty before technical perfection. 

In October 1875, at the height of her fame, Julia Margaret and her husband left Freshwater and moved to their plantations in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). 

Despite taking her cameras with her, she rarely practiced photography due to the shortage of materials and the lack of suitable subjects. In 1879, Cameron died in Ceylon after a brief illness at the age of 63.

Legacy

In 1868, the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) provided Cameron with the use of two rooms to exhibit her photographs, effectively making her the museum’s first artist in residence.

In a career that lasted just over 11 years, Julia Margaret Cameron made just over 1200 photographs. The Royal Photographic Society owns around 800 of these, along with a hand-written manuscript of Cameron’s unfinished autobiography, Annals of my Glasshouse. 

Cameron’s photographs are held in collections of some of the best art museums in America and Europe. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York exhibited her work in 2013.

Her great-niece, the famous writer Virginia Woolf (her mother was Julia Jackson, the subject of some of Cameron’s most arresting portraits) wrote a play about her, titled Freshwater.

To preserve Cameron’s legacy, the Julia Margaret Cameron trust was set up, along with a museum at Dimbola Lodge on the Isle of Wight. The museum provides historical information on her life and works. If you’re ever on the Isle of Wight, then I recommend visiting. 

Julia Margaret Cameron’s Style

• Soft-focus, dreamy
• Close-up, posed
• Experimental, embraced imperfections
• Staged, theatrical
• Narrative, allegorical
• Spiritual, contemplative
• Mysterious, ambiguous

Julia Margaret Cameron’s Working Methods

Because photography as a practice was still in its infancy, Cameron wasn’t bound by convention and was free to make her own rules. The type of images being made by other photographers at the time didn’t interest Cameron.

My first successes in my out-of-focus pictures were a fluke. That is to say, that when focussing and coming to something which, to my eye, was very beautiful, I stopped there instead of screwing on the lens to the more definite focus which all other photographers insist upon.

Julia Margaret Cameron

Cameron was interested in capturing another kind of photographic truth. Not one dependent on the accuracy of sharp detail, but one that conveyed the spirit and emotional state of her sitter. 

Cameron’s exposures were long (often around 5 minutes). Unlike other photographers, she didn’t use any clamps or props, which meant that her sitters had to sit still for a long time. As this was difficult to do, her images sometimes came out soft and out of focus. 

I counted four hundred and five hundred and got one good picture. Poor Wilfrid said it was torture to sit so long, that he was a martyr! I bid him be still and be thankful. I said, I am the martyr. Just try the taking instead of the sitting!

Julia Margaret Cameron

Portraits 

Looking at Cameron’s portraits of men, two things about them are apparent. First, the majority show only the subject’s head and shoulders, with the torso often draped in dark cloth. This makes these photos potentially the first “close-ups” in photographic history. Secondly, she would often light just one side of the face, making the close-up effect even more dramatic and revealing.

When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavoured to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has been almost the embodiment of a prayer.

Julia Margaret Cameron

Cameron took a different approach when photographing women. She framed her subjects at a more traditional distance and threw light onto her sitter from every possible angle, giving her images a softer and more flattering effect. 

She was interested in conveying their natural beauty and often asked female sitters to let down their hair, so she could photograph them as they were and not how they had been accustomed to presenting themselves.

Fancy Subjects for Pictorial Effect

In addition to making portraits both of male and female subjects, Cameron was also one of the first photographers to create narrative-driven photographs or as she liked to call them “fancy subjects for pictorial effect.” 

My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and ideal and sacrificing nothing of the truth by all possible devotion to poetry and beauty.

Ahead of the time again. Cameron’s pictures, in which her sitters posed as figures from history and literature were taken over a century before the likes of Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson began staging photos.

Cameron looked to painting and sculpture as inspiration for her allegorical and narrative subjects. She was also interested in religion, literature and poetry and produced photographic illustrations for Tennyson’s Idylls of the King at his request.

Cameron was not obsessed with conveying narrative fact, or realistic illustrations of religious subjects, but rather wanted to suggest themes that would could be left open to interpretation. Her tableaus have a sense of mystery about them and force the viewer to complete the picture. To me, this is what makes her work so timeless.

A photographer, like all artists, is at liberty to employ what means he thinks necessary to carry out his ideas. If a picture cannot be produced by one negative, let him have two or ten; but let it be clearly understood, that these are only means to an end, and that the picture when finished must stand or fall by the effects produced, and not by the means employed.

Julia Margaret Cameron

The Technical Side

Cameron was not the best of technicians. She often included imperfections in her prints – swirls, streaks and even fingerprints – that many photographers would have rejected as technical flaws. Although she was criticized in his life, these imperfections are now praised for being ahead of their time.

When Cameron took up photography, it involved hard physical work and the use of potentially hazardous chemicals. The wooden camera she used, which sat on a tripod, was extremely large and cumbersome. To make her photos, she used the most common practice at the time, which was albumen prints from wet collodion glass plate negatives.

Here’s a brilliant video from the Victoria and Albert museum which explains the wet collodion process in more detail. After finishing this article, we recommend visiting the V&A website as they have a section dedicated to the work of Julia Margaret Cameron.

Other Julia Margaret Cameron Resources

Recommended Julia Margaret Cameron Books

Disclaimer: Photogpedia is an Amazon Associate and earns from qualifying purchases.

• A Critical Biography
• In Focus: Julia Margaret Cameron
• Julia Margaret Cameron by Marta Weiss

Julia Margaret Cameron Videos

Meet the Photographer (Victoria and Albert Museum)

Julia Margaret Cameron’s Working Methods

Julia Margaret Cameron Photos

View more Julia Margaret Cameron Photos at the Victoria and Albert Museum website.

Fact Check

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Related Articles

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Sources

Museum of Modern Art, Julia Margaret Cameron Biography
Victoria and Albert Museum, Julia Margaret Cameron Collection

Julia Margaret Cameron: A Critical Biography, Colin Ford, 2003
In Focus: Julia Margaret Cameron: Photographs from the Getty Museum, 1996
Julia Margaret Cameron by Marta Weiss, 2015
Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, 2008 
Julia Margaret Cameron The Complete Photographs by Julian Cox 

The Art Story, Julia Margaret Cameron Profile
Dimbola Lodge, Julia Margaret Cameron Biography

The post Julia Margaret Cameron: The Pioneering Victorian Photographer appeared first on Photogpedia.

During his five-decade career, Brandt produced important work in all the major genres of photography: social documentary, landscape, nude, and portrait. 

While he pursued several subjects throughout his lifetime, Brandt tended to focus on one genre for an extended period before moving on to the next one. 

His witty pictures of social life in London during the 1930s and his compassionate photographs during the depression are some of his most memorable images.

Both a visual poet and a historian, his pictures capture and preserve a world that has disappeared forever.

In this article, we will aim to provide an introduction to Brandt’s work, with particular emphasis on his photography style and working methods. 

Related: 28 Bill Brandt Quotes to Learn From

Editor note: If you enjoy our Bill Brandt article and find it helpful, then we would be grateful if you could share it with other photographers through your own blog, social media and forums.

The photographer must first have seen his subject or some aspect of his subject as something transcending the ordinary. It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep with him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time or of the traveler who enters a strange country… they carry within themselves a sense of wonder.

Bill Brandt

Bill Brandt Biography

Name: Bill Brandt (born Hermann Wilhelm Brandt)
Nationality: British
Genre: Documentary, Photojournalism, Nude, Landscape, Portrait
Born: 2nd May 1904 – Hamburg, Germany
Died: 20th December 1983 (79 years old) – London, England

Early Life

Bill Brandt was born in Hamburg, Germany to a German mother and British father. His childhood was mostly spent in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. 

At the age of 16, he contracted tuberculosis and spent six years recovering in a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland. It was during this time that he first took up photography. 

After being sent to Vienna for lung analysis in 1927 he met the Austrian writer, Dr. Eugenie Schwarzwald. She suggested that he should pursue a career in photography. 

Photography Career

Brandt followed her advice and secured an apprenticeship with the Austrian photographer Grete Kolliner. 

While working at the studio, Brandt took the portrait of Ezra Pound. The American poet was impressed with the image and recommended that Brandt go to Paris to work under Man Ray.

Brandt arrived in Paris to begin a three-month apprenticeship at the Man Ray Studio in 1929.

I had the good fortune to start my career in Paris in 1929. For any young photographer at that time, Paris was the centre of the world. Those were the exciting early days when the French poets and surrealists recognized the possibilities of photography. 

Bill Brandt

Although there was little direct teaching from Man Ray, Brandt was able to absorb the new developments in photography and various art movements in Paris. 

Brassai, Kertesz and Cartier-Bresson were all working in Paris, as well as Man Ray. Man Ray, the most original photographer of them all, had just invented the new techniques of rayographs and solarisation. I was a pupil in his studio and learned much from his experiments. 

Bill Brandt

Moving to England and Photojournalism

In 1931, Brandt moved to England at the age of 27 to work as a freelance photographer. 

He decided to pursue a career in photojournalism, a profession still in its infancy. However, Brandt was a photojournalist with a difference. For under the tutelage of Man Ray, Brandt had developed his own moody, surreal style.

Brandt began his career by documenting British life and the contrasts he saw in it. 

He used his family ties to document the wealthy alongside the poor. Many of these images were staged, with family and friends acting out the scenes he wished to create.

After several years of working on the project, he published his first book, The English at Home in 1936. 

The extreme social contrast during those years before the war was, visually, very inspiring for me. I started by photographing in London, the West End, the suburbs, the slums. 

Bill Brandt

Brandt’s documentary work occurred at the same time as the rise of the picture press in England and as a result, his photo series became synonymous with British life between wars. 

I photographed pubs, common lodging houses at night, theatres, Turkish baths, prisons and people in their bedrooms. London has changed so much that some of these pictures now have a period charm almost of another century.

Bill Brandt

The Industrial Depression

After several years of working in London, Brandt decided to travel to the north of England, where he photographed coal-miners during the industrial depression. 

My most successful picture of the series, probably because it was symbolic of this time of mass unemployment, was a loose-coal searcher in East Durham, going home in the evening. He was pushing his bicycle along a footpath through a desolate waste-land between Hebburn and Jarrow. Loaded on the crossbar was a sack of small coal, all that he had found after a day’s search on the slag-heaps. I also photographed the Northern towns and interiors of miners’ cottages, with families having their evening meal, or the miners washing themselves in tin-baths, in front of their kitchen fires.

Bill Brandt

London at Night and War Years

In 1938, Brandt published his second book, A Night in London. 

For the series, Brandt photographed the streets of London after dark, capturing the eerie beauty of the city. 

To light the scenes, he either used street lights or transportable tungsten lights (also known as photo floods). 

The war years were productive for Brandt. He photographed the empty streets, and the war-ravaged buildings of London during the early Blackouts, and the Blitz. 

In 1940, Brandt was commissioned by the government’s Ministry of Information to report on Londoners seeking refuge in underground air-raid shelters. 

The assignment produced some of Brandt’s finest work.

At night Brandt visited the overcrowded shelters (tube stations, church crypts, and cellars) and photographed families huddled in cold, uncomfortable spaces.

His use of artificial light and the contrast between shadow and light make these images incredibly powerful.

Post-War Years

After the war, Brandt decided to change his style and gradually moved away from photojournalism. He later reflected:

Towards the end of the war, my style changed completely. I have often been asked why this happened. I think I gradually lost my enthusiasm for reportage. Documentary photography had become fashionable. Everybody was doing it. Besides, my main theme of the past few years had disappeared; England was no longer a country of marked social contrast.

Bill Brandt

The second half of Brandt’s career brought him further acclaim. 

His photos were more experimental and characterized by a mysterious and brooding quality that provided a fresh look on some of the most common genres: portraiture, landscape and the nude.

[For] whatever the reason, the poetic trend of photography, which had already excited me in my early Paris days, began to fascinate me again. it seemed to me that there were wide fields still unexplored. I began to photograph nudes, portraits, and landscapes. 

Bill Brandt

Brandt returned to portrait photography. Over the next three decades, his portraits of artists, writers, musicians and actors were published in Harper’s Bazaar. 

From 1945 onwards, Brandt took a series of landscape photographs for Lilliput magazine. The images were accompanied by excerpts from famous texts by British writers including Charles Dickens and Emily Brönte. 

Bill Brandt’s Nude Photography

Brandt’s most important images from this period though are the series of nudes taken between 1945 and 1961, which are considered to be his crowning artistic achievement. 

Influenced by the work of Man Ray, Henry Moore, and Picasso, Brandt’s early nude photos were taken typically in interiors and studios using an old Kodak camera with an extremely wide-angle lens (see Brandt’s camera section below).

His later nudes, which became increasingly more abstract and surreal, were taken on beaches of Sussex and northern and southern France.

Brandt’s Later Years

In the 1970s and 1980s, Brandt began to explore new processes. 

He created three-dimensional collages using rocks found on the beach, and started photographing in color for the first time in his career.

His later work was more experimental, and he drew heavily on his interest in surrealism art, and the influence of Man Ray’s work in the 1920s.

When you have done everything inside you, you cannot carry on unless you repeat yourself, and that’s not very interesting.

Bill Brandt

Brandt’s collages and color photographs were exhibited in London in the mid-1970s, and again ten years after his death in 1992.

His work from this period was never embraced by critics and is rarely included in retrospectives of his work.

Brandt spent his remaining years reissuing his work in a series of books and teaching photography at the Royal College of Art.

Bill Brandt died in London on 20 December 1983 at the age of 79.

Brandt’s Photography Legacy

Brandt’s work was published in magazines domestically and abroad including Lilliput, Picture Post and Harper’s Bazaar.

His books, which include A Night in London (1938), Camera in London (1948) and Perspective of Nudes (1961) are among the most influential photo books of the period. 

Brandt had his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1969. His work has since been the subject of major retrospectives in both the UK and abroad.

His photography is held in several public collections, including the Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum. 

Brandt’s work has influenced many photographers including Robert Frank, Sir Don McCullin, David Bailey and Roger Mayne.

In 1984, Bill Brandt was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum. He received an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art in London and was also named an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain. 

Bill Brandt’s Style

• Black and white, contrasty
• Moody, atmospheric
• Dramatic, haunting
• Stark light, and use of shadows
• Mysterious, ambiguous
• Surreal, dream-like

Bill Brandt’s Working Methods

Landscape Photography

Bill Brandt’s landscape photos have a mysterious brooding beauty that is unique, yet widely imitated. He often visited the same place many times before capturing his image. Below he explains his process and the importance of patience:

To be able to take pictures of a landscape I have to become obsessed with a particular scene. Sometimes I feel that I have been to a place long ago, and must try to recapture what I remember. When I have found a landscape which I want to photograph, I wait for the right season, the right weather, and right time of day or night, to get the picture which I know to be there.

One of my favourite pictures of this time is Top Withens on the Yorkshire Moors. I was then trying to photograph the country which had inspired Emily Bronte. I went to the West Riding in summer, but there were tourists and it seemed quite the wrong time of the year. I liked it better, misty, rainy and lonely in November. But I was not satisfied until I saw it again in February. I took the picture just after a hailstorm when a high wind was blowing over the moors.

Bill Brandt

Nude Photography

Brandt focused on nudes for over three decades and considers it the climax of his creative photography and the most satisfying of his work. 

He began experimenting with nude photography in the late 1930s, although he didn’t publish any of these photos until 1961 with the release of his book Perspective of Nudes.

In 1944, Brandt purchased a mahogany and brass camera by Kodak with a Zeiss Protar wide-angle lens that gave his nude photographs an “altered perspective and a less conventional image.”

By using this antiquated equipment he was able to produce an image where the human form was heavily distorted and viewed in an unrealistically deep perspective. 

In 1977, Brandt began a second series of nudes, which appeared along with some earlier photographs in the book Nudes 1945-1980 (1981).

His early work featured naked models in domestic interiors and on the beaches of East Sussex and northern and southern France. While his later, more experimental and abstract nude work, was shot mainly in the Mediterranean.

Portrait Photography 

Although Brandt’s photography career began with his portrait of Ezra Pound in 1928, he didn’t return to the genre until the 1940s. 

Over the next 40 years, he took portraits of writers, actors, musicians and painters for Lilliput, Harper’s Bazaar and Picture Post.

Brandt liked to photograph his subjects in their homes or their own surroundings. He tended to avoid isolating his sitter’s face or focus on their expression. He also never placed them in the center of the frame.

I always take portraits in my sitter’s own surroundings. I concentrate very much on the picture as a whole and leave the sitter rather to himself. I hardly talk and barely look at him. This often seems to make people forget what is going on and any affected or self-conscious expression usually disappears. I try to avoid the fleeting expression and vivacity of a snapshot. A composed expression seems to have a more profound likeness. I think a good portrait ought to tell something of the subject’s past and suggest something of his future. 

Bill Brandt

The Darkroom

Bill Brandt enjoyed working in the darkroom and liked to experiment, making many prints of the same negative.

It takes a long time to produce a good print.

He wasn’t one for mass production. Each print was an original, printed and finished by Brandt with utmost care.

I consider it essential that the photographer should do his own printing and enlarging. The final effect of the finished print depends so much on these operations. And only the photographer himself knows the effect he wants. He should know by instinct, grounded in experience, what subjects are enhanced by hard or soft, light or dark treatment. But … no amount of toying with shades of print or with printing papers will transform a commonplace photograph into anything other than a commonplace photograph… It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do.

Bill Brandt

Manipulating the Negative

Brandt liked to manipulate his negatives in the darkroom and quite often cropped an image if it made for a better photograph. This technique can be seen below in his photo of Hadrian’s Wall.

Brandt also liked to combine elements of two negatives into a single print. This was long before the days of Photoshop layers and incredibly innovative for the time. 

An example can be seen in his photo, Early Morning on the River (1936). 

The image of the seagull, which would have been impossible to photograph with such clarity in low light, was montaged onto a separate photograph of London Bridge and the Thames in fog. Brandt added the morning sun to the image a few years later.

It is the result that counts, no matter how it was achieved. I find the darkroom work most important, as I can finish the composition of a picture only under the enlarger. I do not understand why this is supposed to interfere with the truth. Photographers should follow their own judgment, and not the fads and dictates of others. 

Bill Brandt

The Print

The bulk of his prints were made on 8 x 10 inch, single-weight glossy paper. From the mid-1950s, Brandt preferred to print on high contrast paper (typically grade 4 extra hard paper), which allowed him to intensify the black and whites.

Photography is still a very new medium and everything is allowed and everything should be tried. And there are certainly no rules about the printing of a picture. Before 1951, I liked my prints dark and muddy. Now I prefer the very contrasting black-and-white effect. It looks crisper, more dramatic and very different from color photographs.

Bill Brandt

Influences

Brandt worked as an apprentice under Man Ray for three months in 1927. He was heavily influenced by Ray’s experimental style of photography, as well as his use of extreme cropping and grain to create mood and drama. 

Brandt greatly admired the work of fellow photographer and close friend Brassaï. In fact, Brandt’s second book, A Night in London (1938) was based on Brassaï’s Paris de Nuit (1933). 

His post-war photography, in particular his nude series, was influenced by the film, Citizen Kane and the deep focus technique used by cinematographer Gregg Toland.

When Citizen Kane was first shown, I’d never seen a film in which real rooms were used and you could see everything, the ceiling, and terrific perspective, it was all there. It was quite revolutionary, Citizen Kane, and I was very much inspired by it and I thought: ‘I must take photographs like that.

Bill Brandt

Other influences include the films of Luis Buñuel and Alfred Hitchcock (his early work), Edward Weston’s dune landscape photos from the 1930s, the paintings of Salvadore Dalí, René Magritte, Picasso and Matisse, and the semi-abstract sculptures of Henry Moore. 

What Camera Did Bill Brandt Use?

• Hasselblad with Zeiss Biogon 38mm 
• Rolleiflex
• Kodak Camera (6.5 x 8.5 plate) with Zeiss Protar 8.5cm/f18 and 11 cm/f18 lenses.

For his photojournalism and portrait work, Brandt used a Rolleiflex. From the 1950s, he used a Hasselblad with a Zeiss Biogon 38mm super wide-angle lens for his landscape and nude photography.

Brandt used 400 ASA black and white film. He tested several 35 mm cameras but didn’t like the size of the viewfinder. 

I have tried several models but I find the viewfinder image far too small. I like to see a larger image in order to compose my picture. Composition is essential; good design is inseparable from a good picture. Unfortunately, very few young photographers seem to have any thought or sense of design. They just snap.

Bill Brandt

Kodak Camera and Wide-Angle

In 1945, Brandt picked up a nineteenth-century Kodak camera which he used for his nude photography series.

Feeling frustrated by modern cameras and lenses which seemed designed to imitate human vision and conventional sight, I was looking everywhere for a camera with a very wide angle. One day in a second hand shop, near Covent Garden, I found a 70-year-old wooden Kodak. I was delighted. Like nineteenth-century cameras it had no shutter, and the wide-angle lens, with an aperture as minute as a pinhole, was focused on infinity.

Bill Brandt

Using the fixed-focus camera with a wide-angle lens, allowed him to create heavily distorted images and “see like a mouse, a fish or a fly.” 

It had no shutter, the aperture in its wide-angle lens was as small as a pinhole, and it was permanently focused on infinity. It had been used by Scotland Yard for police record work and by auctioneers to make inventories. He loaded the camera with a fast film, and started experimenting. The image on the ground glass was so dim it was useless for pre-planning the picture. The camera had to do its own seeing. Each exposure was a gamble; a picture could never be duplicated. Yet he was immediately excited by the weird results. Perspective was so steep it created an entirely new feeling of picture space.

Other Bill Brandt Resources

Recommended Bill Brandt Books

Disclaimer: Photogpedia is an Amazon Associate and earns from qualifying purchases.

• Shadow and Light
• Bill Brandt: Photographs 1928-1983
• Brandt: The Photography of Bill Brandt 
• Bill Brandt: A Life

Bill Brandt Videos

BBC Masters of Photography: Bill Brandt (1983)

Bill Brandt Photos

You can view more Bill Brandt Photos on the Museum of Modern Art website.

Recommended Reading

Victoria and Albert Museum, Bill Brandt Section
The Bill Brandt Archive
Bill Brandt Statement on Photography, Camera in London, 1948 
Creative Camera Owner Magazine Article

Fact Check

With every profile article, we strive to be accurate and fair. If you see something that doesn’t look right, then contact us and we’ll update the post.

If there is anything else you would like to add about Bill Brandt’s work then send us an email: hello(at)photogpedia.com

Link to Photogpedia

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Finally, don’t forget to subscribe to our monthly newsletter, and follow us on Instagram and Twitter.

Related Articles

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Decisive Moment
Don McCullin: Sleeping with Ghosts

Sources

Museum of Modern Art, Bill Brandt Biography
Victoria and Albert Museum, Bill Brand Archive
International Photography Hall of Fame, Bill Brandt Induction
Bill Brandt: Behind the Camera, Philadelphia Museum of Art 
Michael Hoppen Gallery, Bill Brandt Biography

Brandt: The Photography of Bill Brandt 
Behind the Camera 
Bill Brandt: Photographs 1928-1983
Bill Brandt: A Life, Paul Delany, 2004
Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography, 2005

Creative Camera Owner Magazine 1970s
Statement on Photography, Camera in London, 1948
Masters of Photography: Bill Brandt, BBC, 1983

The post Bill Brandt: Shadows of Life appeared first on Photogpedia.

His psychological allegories, which often tackle the themes of solitude and isolation, are elaborately constructed studies in what he calls, “hyper-realism.” 

With a budget similar to that of an independent movie, Crewdson transforms his real, suburban settings into entirely fictional worlds. 

His work is set up, lit and acted in old-Hollywood fashion: houses are demolished, rooms are flooded and babies cry between shots. And his subjects are often residents of the small town he’s shooting in.

In a career that spans more than three decades, Crewdson has produced several widely acclaimed bodies of work including Natural Wonder (1997), Twilight (2002), and Dream House (2008). 

His work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art.

In this article, we will provide an introduction to the career and photography style of one of the most important fine-art photographers today. 

Related: 57 Gregory Crewdson Quotes on Staged Photography and Storytelling

To learn more about Gregory Crewdson’s remarkable work, we recommend watching the 2012 feature documentary film, Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters (see recommended videos section).

About Gregory Crewdson

Name: Gregory Crewdson
Born: September 26, 1962 
Nationality: American
Genre: Fine-art, Conceptual, Still Life, Landscape

Gregory Crewdson Biography 

Gregory Crewdson was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1962. He was first introduced to photography at the age of ten when his father took him to see the 1972 retrospective exhibition of Diane Arbus at the Museum of Modern Art.

When I was 10, my father brought me to a Diane Arbus exhibition. He was a psychoanalyst and those pictures have a certain psychological quality, so somehow I made a connection between what he did as a job and Arbus looking for secrets. It wasn’t like I decided I was going to be a photographer exactly then. But that was the first time I understood the power of photographs and so I probably filed that away somewhere as a defining memory.

I didn’t start taking pictures until I was in college. I had a crush on a girl who was photo major, and followed her into a photography class. My Photography teacher was Laurie Simmons, and my crush went from the girl to my teacher. As soon as I took my first pictures, my crush shifted from the teacher to photography.

Gregory Crewdson

As an art student at State University of New York at Purchase from 1981 to 1985, Crewdson studied photography in a suburban community, an environment that would later be the focus for the majority of his images. 

During this time, Crewdson worked at Aperture magazine and also did an internship at the Daniel Wolf Gallery in Manhattan. 

It was at this point that he met Joel Sternfeld, whose photographs of the American landscape he greatly admired, along with those of Robert Frank, William Eggleston and the paintings of Edward Hopper.

A primary source of inspiration for his work is the natural landscape of western Massachusetts where his family purchased land on which to build a log cabin when he was a teenager. 

This area of pristine terrain has served as a retreat for Crewdson throughout his career and provided him with a model of American life.

Finding his Style

Crewdson first began to photograph suburban life while working on his Master of Fine Arts thesis at Yale University between 1986 and 1988, asking residents from the nearby town of Lee, Massachusetts to participate in a series of theatrically composed genre scenes. 

By the late 1980s, Crewdson had abandoned real-life situations to create still life and dioramas of natural environments, which he built in his studio and then photographed. 

In the late 1970s, Cindy Sherman began taking a series of photographs in which she re-created the promotional stills from Hollywood B-movies.

Crewdson expanded on Sherman’s concept in the 1990s, creating extensive and elaborate staged tableaux (living pictures) in which he too created a new fiction by combining everyday reality with the extraordinary. 

Gregory Crewdson Photography Style

• Theatrical, staged
• Narrative driven, conceptual
• Tableau, hyper-realism, often fantasy
• Multi-layered, scene within a scene
• Mysterious, ambiguous
• Cinematic, painterly

Photography Technique

Crewdson actively creates a world as he imagines it and photographs it for us to see. 

I’m interested in the question of narrative, how photography is distinct from, but connected to, other narrative forms like writing and film. This idea of creating a moment that’s frozen and mute, that perhaps ultimately asks more questions than it answers, proposes an open-ended and ambiguous narrative that allows the viewer to, in a sense, complete it. Ultimately, I’m interested in this ambiguous moment that draws the viewer in through photographic beauty, through repulsion, through some kind of tension. 

Staged Photography

His photography is elaborately staged and composed, presenting a complete yet ambiguous narrative within one photograph.

Left open to interpretation, his photographs exist in a realm of metaphors influenced by cinema and in particular the films of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch and Steven Spielberg.

I always loved movies and the look of movies. I’m also a huge student of movies – but could never make one. Working in a linear fashion is foreign to me. I was always interested in using aspects of film production towards a single image – the relationship between movie making and still photography – and blurring the lines between the two. I’m fascinated with telling a story in a single image rather than through time. 

Gregory Crewdson

Single Frame

Crewdson’s working method is often compared to a movie director, but instead of telling a story in 130,000 frames, he condenses the story into a single frame.

I’m only concerned with that particular moment, the moment of the picture. I really don’t have any interest in what happens before, or what happens after. In a certain way, it’s a privilege that I don’t have to think about plot, or storyline, or character development, that I can just focus on that moment, and how to make that moment as beautiful and as mysterious as possible.

The Stills Director

The difference between Crewdson and other photographers is that he directs his vision/or concept and hires technicians to help serve that vision.

Crewdson regularly works with crews of 30 or more people to construct complicated sets and lighting setups. He has his own director of photography, storyboard/concept artists, photo editor and he doesn’t even operate the camera himself.

It’s important to remember though that he didn’t always work this way. When starting out he either worked solo or with a tiny team.

The thing that people just don’t quite ever completely understand is that the process started off very organically. It started off slowly, and the small group became a larger group. Then slowly but surely, we put together a team over the years, and suddenly you’re working with a crew. For me, this is the way I know how to make pictures.

Gregory Crewdson

Despite the large scope of his productions, Crewdson’s carefully composed scenes and controlled lighting recall the intricate arrangements of early still life photography. 

Crewdson maintains this traditional approach to photography but magnifies it to the largest possible scale. In this way, he turns the real world into a fictional stage, creating complex images of a choreographed reality.

What Camera Does Gregory Crewdson Use?

Crewdson now uses a Phase One camera, set up like a view camera.  

Previously he used a large format Sinar 8×10 view film camera with a 210mm lens.

The 210mm is a wide lens and is roughly the equivalent of 28mm in 35mm photography. 

The large-format camera helps capture all the detail for his huge 7ft gallery prints. His images are enhanced digitally in photoshop and sometimes stitched together before printing.

We print these images in large format at this size because it’s like… Well to me it’s like a picture window.

Use of Light 

Crewdson works very closely with his DP, Director of Photography and only uses continuous lights on his projects.

If there’s one characteristic that separates my work from other artists, it is the light. And to me it’s the most important thing about the entire enterprise – the light. It’s how you tell the story in photography, through light. We started working more dramatically in this way with the Twilight series. 

Gregory Crewdson

Fine Art Prints

Crewdson prints his work with an Epson printer on luster paper (normally) with white borders. He now prints in editions of only three (for his Twilight series it was 10). The print is mounted and framed, and his signature is on a sticker that’s part of the frame. His C-Type prints are generally sized at 48 x 60 inches.

Other Gregory Crewdson Resources

Recommended Books

Disclaimer: Photogpedia is an Amazon Associate and earns from qualifying purchases

• Gregory Crewdson: 1985-2005
• Twilight: Photographs by Gregory Crewdson
• Dream of Life

Recommended Videos

Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters (2012)

There But Not There: Gregory Crewdson Documentary (2017)

Gregory Crewdson Photos

Fact Check

With every profile post, we strive to be accurate and fair. If you see something that doesn’t look right, then contact us and we’ll update the post.

If there is anything else you would like to add about Gregory Crewdson’s work then send us an email: hello(at)photogpedia.com

Link to Photogpedia

If you’ve enjoyed the article or you’ve found it useful then we would be grateful if you could link back to us or share online through twitter or any other social media channel. 

Sources

Bomb Magazine Interview, October 1997 
American Photo, May-Jun 2003
Interview: Gregory Crewdson, Mystery in Everyday Life, Popular Photography, March 2014
ArtNet, Experience the Suburban Beauty and Isolation of Gregory Crewdson, 2016 
An Interview with Gregory Crewdson, PetaPixel, May 2016 
Studio International Interview, July 2017

Gagosian Website, Gregory Crewdson profile
Sotheby’s, Gregory Crewdson Biography
The Times, How Gregory Crewdson captured the dark heart of America, June 2017
Huck Magazine, Gregory Crewdson spends years crafting photos on a cinematic scale, 2017

Gregory Crewdson: 1985-2005, Hatje Cantz, 2005
Twilight: Gregory Crewdson, Abrams 2002

Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, 2012
There But Not There: Gregory Crewdson Documentary, 2017

The post Gregory Crewdson: The Mystery in Everyday Life appeared first on Photogpedia.

Mark was fearless in her choice of subjects, photographing people on the fringes of society, or in her own words, those “that didn’t have the lucky breaks in life”. 

She sought out female mental patients in Oregon, heroin addicts in London, prostitutes in Bombay, and homeless teenagers in Seattle. Her subject choice was often people that were abused and vulnerable; some were survivors, while others were lost souls.

I’m a documentary photographer. Reality is so bizarre, you could never think of those ideas. Fiction writers are great in the sense that they can imagine. I could never ‘imagine’ things. What I’m really great at is looking – that’s my forte – to be able to pull things from reality, to see what’s strange and real.

Mary Ellen Mark

Mark was also a portraitist, took advertising commissions and led a successful parallel career as an on-set stills photographer in Hollywood. However, it was her documentary work that resonated most with the public and influenced photographers around the globe.

Related: 65 Mary Ellen Mark Quotes to Transform your Photography

In this article, we will provide an overview of Mary Ellen Mark’s work. If you want to learn more about her life and photography projects, then I recommend checking out the Mary Ellen Mark website (after you’ve read through this article).

Editor note: If you enjoy our Mary Ellen Mark profile or find it helpful, then we would be grateful if you could share it with other photographers through your own websites, social media and forums.

About Mary Ellen Mark

Name: Mary Ellen Mark
Nationality: American
Genre: Documentary, Photojournalism, Portraiture, Film Stills, Advertising, Street
Born: March 20, 1940 – Philadelphia 
Died: May 25, 2015 (75 years) – New York

Mary Ellen Mark Biography

Mary Ellen Mark was born in Philadelphia in 1940 to a middle-class family. She attended the University of Pennsylvania and received her undergraduate training in the fine arts, followed by a BFA in art history and painting in 1962. 

Mark began to take photography more seriously while continuing her education at the University of Pennsylvania as a graduate student, receiving an MA in photojournalism in 1964.

After she graduated, she was given a Fulbright Scholarship and went to Turkey to hone her photography skills, this was followed by extensive travel throughout Europe. 

In 1966, Mark moved to New York City, where she lived for the rest of her life, and began to work as a freelance photojournalist. 

She traveled to India, a country that has inspired some of her most significant work, for the first time in 1968.

Mark photographed throughout the United States, and in many other parts of the world, among them Mexico, England, India, Spain and Vietnam. 

Early on in her career, Mark achieved success as a stills photographer for the film industry. This lucrative career helped subsidize the cost of her social documentary projects. 

She shot production stills for dozens of films, including Alice’s Restaurant, Apocalypse Now, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Day of the Locust and Australia.

Mark’s film stills raised her profile and she was soon offered assignments from magazines, including a 1969 commission from Look to create a photo-essay on Federico Fellini, who was directing the film Fellini Satyricon, which she considered her breakthrough story in photojournalism.

Her photos have appeared in magazines Life, Time, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Paris-Match, The New York Times and The New Yorker, as well as virtually all the leading photography magazines and journals. 

Mark was a member of Magnum from 1977 to 1981. In 1988, she opened her own agency.

For over 20 years Mary Ellen Mark taught photography workshops to budding photographers in Oaxaca, Mexico. 

Mark published 18 books in her career, including Streetwise, Indian Circus and American Odyssey; and her images have been published in many anthologies and exhibition catalogs.  

She received numerous awards, including the Lifetime Achievement in Photography Award from the George Eastman House in 2014 and an Outstanding Contribution Photography Award from the World Photography Organisation. 

What I’m trying to do is make photographs that are universally understood… that cross-cultural lines. I want my photographs to be about the basic emotions and feelings that we all experience. 

Mary Ellen Mark

Photography Style

• Photojournalism, documentary
• Photoessay, reportage
• Social realism, subjects on fringes of society 
• Compassionate, intimate and humanistic
• Subjective and honest

Mary Ellen Mark specialized in social documentation as well as portraiture, working mainly with black and white film. 

While some of her editorial work involved portraits of celebrities, including actors, directors, writers, and musicians, more often Mark photographed those she liked to call the “unfamous,” people outside the mainstream whose lives are not conventionally newsworthy. 

I’m just interested in people on the edges. I feel an affinity for people who haven’t had the best breaks in society. I’m always on their side. I find them more human, maybe. What I want to do more than anything is to acknowledge their existence. 

Mary Ellen Mark

Documentary Photography

She was drawn particularly to subjects whose lives play out within a troubled situation, such as addiction, poverty, or illness; and those who live in groups that function like a substitute family, such as inhabitants of a brothel or performers in a touring circus. 

The variety of her topics reflected the assignments offered to her by magazines and her own personal interests. 

She typically funded her projects through a variety of means, including grants, financial support from non-profit organizations, and selling her story ideas to magazines and other commercial outlets.

Mark liked to fully immerse herself into projects over an extended period, to fully develop a relationship with her subjects.

Here are several examples: 

• Mark lived in a women’s maximum-security unit in a mental institution in Oregon for 36 days, resulting in the book Ward 81 (1979).
• She spent several months on two separate trips to India in 1980 and 1981 photographing Mother Teresa and her Missions of Charity in Calcutta for a Life magazine assignment and a subsequent book
• In 1992, Mark traveled to India and spent time with 16 different circuses during two three-month trips to produce the book Indian Circus. 

I saw that my camera gave me a sense of connection with others that I never had before. It allowed me to enter lives, satisfying a curiosity that was always there, but that was never explored before… I realized all of the possibilities that could exist for me with my camera; all of the images that I could capture, all of the lives I could enter, all of the people I could meet and how much I could learn from them. 

Mary Ellen Mark

Photo-Essays and Projects

Mark would also stay in touch with her subjects long after a project is finished. 

For example, she returned to Seattle repeatedly to photograph Erin Blackwell (better known as Tiny) who was 14 when Mark first photographed her for a photo-essay for Life in 1983. 

This assignment would later lead to the Academy Award-nominated film Street-wise (1985), which was directed by Mark’s husband, the filmmaker Martin Bell, as well as Mark’s book of the same title.

Mark revealed the personalities of her subjects, and their relationship to their environment, and made no pretense to her objectivity. 

I just wanted to do photographs that I believed in without having any rhyme or reason or theory or having to spell out a sort of storytelling. I wanted to show their personalities – that was the thing that drew me to them.

Mary Ellen Mark

She always strived for each image, including those that were part of a photo-essay, to be able to stand alone as a single image, to sum up, and provide an insight into the life and personality of a particular subject. 

I think each photographer has a point of view and away of looking at the world… that has to do with your subject matter and how you choose to present it. What’s interesting is letting people tell you about themselves in the picture.

Mary Ellen Mark

What Camera Did Mary Ellen Mark Use?

Mark used a variety of different cameras and lenses to achieve her imagery, ranging from 35 mm to large-format 4×5. 

She used prime lenses and liked to work close to her subjects, preferring a wider field of view (between 24mm and 35mm). 

When working with the 35mm film format, Mark used a Leica M6 rangefinder camera, and the Canon EOS-1N with 24mm, 28mm, and 35mm lenses. On occasion, she used the Hasselblad X-Pan, with a 30mm lens. 

She quite often worked with medium format, and used Hasselblad cameras usually with a 60mm lens; and the Mamiya 7 with 43mm, 50mm and 65mm lenses. I have also seen clips of her using a Mamiya RZ Pro.

When shooting large-format film, she used a Linhof Technika 45 (4×5 view camera,) and Schneider 120mm, 135mm nd 150mm lenses. She also used the huge 250lb 20×24 Polaroid Land camera for a couple of projects. 

Each system does something different. I like to switch around.

Mary Ellen Mark

Film Photography

She never shot digital and was faithful to film photography right to the very end. 

I’m staying with film, and with silver prints and no Photoshop… [that’s] the way I learned photography. You make your picture in the camera. 

Mary Ellen Mark

She favored black and white over color photography. That being said, she would occasionally shoot certain projects in color, including the images made for her book Prostitutes of Bombay (1981), which show prostitutes in Bombay situated in the colorfully patterned interior rooms of brothels.

When working as a stills photographer on film sets, Mark worked with Kodak Tri-X (which she rated at 200). For her color photography projects, she used Fuji HPH and Kodak PNC films.

Recommended Books

Disclaimer: Photogpedia is an Amazon Associate and earns from qualifying purchases.

• The Book of Everything (It’s expensive but if you’re a fan of Mary Ellen Mark’s work, this is the only book you’ll ever need.)
• On the Portrait and the Moment
• An American Odyssey 1963-1999

Recommended Videos

The Photographs of Mary Ellen Mark, CBS (2001)

Portraits & Portrayals Lecture (2013)

Helena Christensen and Mary Ellen Mark, Capture Episode (2013)

Mary Ellen Mark Photos

For more photos, head over to the Mary Ellen Mark Foundation website.

Fact Check

With every profile post, we strive to be accurate and fair. If you see something that doesn’t look right, then contact us and we’ll update the post.

If there is anything else you would like to add about Mary Ellen Mark’s work then send us an email: hello(at)photogpedia.com

Link to Photogpedia

If you’ve enjoyed the article or you’ve found it useful then we would be grateful if you could link back to us or share on social media or photogrphy forums.

Finally, don’t forget to subscribe to our monthly newsletter, and follow us on Instagram and Twitter.

Related Articles

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Decisive Moment
Snapshot Profile: Diane Arbus
Quote Series: Documentary and Photojournalism Quotes

Sources

Mary Ellen Mark Obituary, The Guardian, May 2015
Vogue Tribute, Vogue, May 2015
In Memoriam: Mary Ellen Mark, Time Magazine, May 2015
Remembering Mary Ellen Mark, British Photography Journal, 2015 
Mary Ellen Mark was the photographer who saw it all, Dazed, 2020
A Life Defending Humanity, Blind Magazine, September 2020
Biography, Mary Ellen Mark Foundation website

The Masters, American Photo, January 1990
The Triumph of Photography, American Photo, January 1992
Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography, 2006
An American Odyssey, Aperture, 2004
Mary Ellen Mark: On the Portrait and the Moment, Aperture, 2015 

The photographs of Mary Ellen Mark, CBS, 2001
Portraits & Portrayals Lecture, 2013
Capture Episode, 2013

The post Mary Ellen Mark: The Depths Of Humanity appeared first on Photogpedia.

Horst’s career spanned more than sixty years between 1931 and 1991. During that time, the name ‘Horst’ became synonymous with the use of dramatic lighting, elegance and atmospheric style. 

He was a master of light, composition and atmospheric illusion, and his pioneering work in the 1930s helped shape modern-day fashion and portrait photography. 

Best known for his glamorous images of women and fashion, Horst meticulously posed his models, focusing on form and mystery, to create iconic images that transcend fashion and time.

Working mainly in Paris and New York, his photographs graced the pages and covers of Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, Queen and House and Garden from the 1930s onwards and he received the Master of Photography award in 1996.

For many photographers, Horst’s work remains the gold standard. Fashion photographers Herb Ritts, Tim Walker, Steven Meisel and Bruce Weber have all reimagined Horst’s pictures and acknowledged his influence. 

The elegance of his photographs… took you to another place, very beautifully… the untouchable quality of the people is really interesting as it gives you something of a distance… it’s like seeing somebody from another world… and you wonder who that person is and you really want to know that person and really want to fall in love with that person.

Bruce Weber

If you enjoy this article or find it helpful then we would be grateful if you could share Photogpedia through the usual channels (websites, forums, social media, etc). 

Related: Top 11 Inspiring Horst P. Horst Quotes

Editor note: This article took a week to research and write – sharing takes just a couple of minutes and doesn’t cost anything. Thank you for your continued support.

About Horst P. Horst

Name: Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann
Nationality: German/American
Genre: Fashion, Portrait, Commercial, Nude, Lifestyle, Still Life, Architecture
Born: August 14, 1906 – Weißenfels-an-der-Saale, Germany
Died: November 18, 1999 (aged 93) – Florida, United States

Horst Biography

Horst was born in 1906 in Weissenfels-an-der-Saale in Germany, the son of a merchant. After his education at the Schulpforta, followed by a short period in Switzerland and Capri, he was sent by his parents to work for a Hamburg export company. 

He returned to study at Hamburg’s Kunstgewerbeschule, a well-known school of applied arts under the direction of Walter Gropius. While there he wrote to the architect Le Corbusier and was invited to be a student-apprentice in Paris in the late 1920s. 

Enter Photography

After meeting George Hoyningen-Huene, who at the time, was established as the French capital’s leading portrait and fashion photographer, Horst decided to pursue photography instead.

Horst started his career at Vogue helping out with sets at the magazines studio in Paris. He began taking pictures himself and continued working for Conde Nast Publications in Paris as a staff photographer from 1932 to 1935. 

Largely self-taught, Horst’s work was published in Vogue less than two years after picking up the camera for the first time. He would later describe his first photograph as, “a brave click of the shutter.”

He immigrated to the United States in 1935 and became an American citizen in 1943, changing his surname from Bohrmann to Horst. He served in the U.S. Army from 1942 – 1945 as a technical Sergeant. 

Establishing his Style

His career flourished in the 1930s and photographed prolifically in a style that embraced theatricality and classicism simultaneously.

He took over as chief photographer in Vogue’s Paris studio when Huene left to join Harper’s Bazaar.

One of his favorite models was Lisa Fonnsagrives (later Lisa Penn), and it was his work with Lisa that demonstrated a gradual shift in approach.

He eliminated the use of props, and instead relied on his mastery of studio lighting, established a unique style that would make him famous. 

Lisa was also the subject of some of his most successful nude studies. Horst’s inventiveness and understanding of graphical power can be seen on the cover of the June 1, 1940 edition of Vogue. For the image, he posed the athletic Lisa to create letters that spell out the magazine’s title. 

Paris in the 30s

Horst moved with the who’s who of the Paris scene in the 1930s. Amongst his closest friends were Coco Chanel, artist Christian Berard, Gertrude Stein, and Luchino Visconti.

Horst was asked to photograph Chanel for Vogue, but he found out she hated the picture. Ready to pose several days later, she showed up with a bag of her jewelry. She became absorbed in thinking about a love affair that was ending; this was the image Horst captured. It became her favorite image for many years.

He continued to have great success with his fashion work, which was formally inventive, ingenuously lit, often with a slightly surrealistic edge. 

He shared with the Surrealists a fascination with the female form, often eroticizing the body in his images.

This sense of the strange and the dramatic is beautifully evoked in Dali’s costumes for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo production of Massine’s Bacchanale, executed by Chanel, which appeared in the October 1939 edition of Vogue.

Horst’s Mainbocher Corset 

Horst’s Mainbocher Corset (1939) is one of the most iconic fashion photos of the Twentieth-Century . The erotically charged image was first published in the September 1939 edition of American Vogue and is an undisputed masterpiece of fashion photography. 

I had never photographed a corset before. It wasn’t easy. The light in the photo is more complex than you think. It looks as though there is only one light source. But there were reflectors and extra spotlights as well. I don’t know how I did it. I couldn’t repeat it. It was created by emotion. 

Horst P. Horst

Mainbocher Corset was also to be the last photograph Horst took in Paris before the war. 

I left the studio at 4:00 a.m., went back to the house, picked up my bags, and caught the 7:00 a.m. train to Le Harve to board the Normandy… For me, this photograph is the essence of that moment. While I was taking it, I was thinking of all that I was leaving behind. 

Horst P Horst

Madonna would later recreate Horst’s iconic fashion image in her music video for Vogue in 1990. You can also see the influence in Bryan Ferry’s Slave to Love music video too.

Color Photography and Books

Horst was quick to master the new color processes, which were introduced in the late 1930s. Although he perhaps is best known for his black and white imagery, he also created hundreds of vibrant fashion photographs for Vogue. 

Very few of Horst’s vintage color prints exist today because, at the time, the color capture process took place on a transparency, which could be reproduced without the need to create a separate print. 

Horst published his first book, Photographs of the Decade in 1945. His second book, Patterns From Nature was published the following year. 

Horst’s Advertising Work

In the late 1940s, Horst began taking on lucrative advertising contracts, this was partly due to fashion and cosmetic companies being more receptive to his style of lighting and giving him more freedom.

Horst continued to do advertising work well into the second half of the century working for the likes of Calvin Klein, Yves Saint Laurent, and Bill Blass.

In the early 1950s, Horst fell out of favor with Vogue when the magazine’s editor retired and was replaced by Jessica Daves whose outlook reflected the conservative nature of the times.

I was told that no model was to be photographed with her feet more than 12 inches apart, standing or walking. A photograph that I took of a girl sitting on the floor had to be retaken ‘because no lady sits on the floor.

Horst P Horst

Return to Vogue and New Direction

In 1962, when Diana Vreeland came to Vogue as editor-in-chief, she commissioned Horst to report on the Edwardian Consuelo Vanderbilt Marlborough Balsan and her collection of French works of art, beginning a new phase of Horst’s career. 

Horst and his long term partner, the writer Valentine Lawford, set off around the world, reporting on the lives of the “tres chic.” 

In this work, he pioneered the use of the small format camera and natural light for society portraiture and fashion photography. He also originated “lifestyle photography,” an amalgam of formal portraiture, an unspoken narrative, and the capturing of the surroundings of the subject.

Horst’s Legacy

Horst is one of the most adaptable photographers of all-time: he specialized in fashion (producing over 90 cover images for Vogue alone), portraits, nudes, travel, and later with Valentine Lawford houses, gardens, and lifestyle photography.

He continued to photograph for Conde ́Nast well into his 80s, and died on the 18th November 1999, at his home in Florida at the age of 93. He was survived by his adopted son, who is also his archivist, Richard J Horst. 

In 1989, Horst received the Lifetime Achievement Award of The Council of Fashion Designers of America, and, in 1996, the Master of Photography Award from the International Center for Photography. 

Horst published several books in his lifetime including Photographs of a Decade (1944); Horst, His Work and His World (1984); and Horst – Sixty Years of Photography (1991). His work has been collected in major museums in New York, Cologne, and London (Victoria and Albert Museum.)

Horst P. Horst’s Photography Style

• Dramatic lighting, use of silhouette
• Elegance, beauty
• Classical aesthetic, posed, ornamental
• Theatrical, studio atmosphere 
• Mysterious, inventiveness and surreal elements 
• Trompe-l’oeil (trick of the eye), a photograph within a photograph

What characterizes his photography from others is his use of dramatic lighting and his conception of beauty. 

Horst was influenced by the master painters, and he also studied classical poses and Greek sculpture. 

He devoted meticulous attention to every detail of the image such as the positioning of hands, arms, and feet. After a few years, he developed a more ornamental style of photography.

Horst may not have revolutionized fashion photography in the same way Martin Munkácsi and later Richard Avedon did, but he certainly perfected it.

Photography Process

He liked to be well prepared coming into a photo session. His lighting and studio props (of which he used many) were arranged in advance.

Horst’s studio substitutes for the world. With the right light and props, he creates an atmosphere, a personal ambiance, before a few square meters of white screen.

He goes to the studio, where everything has already been prepared. By him, even, the night before. The lights are in place, the props selected. There is no dithering. Brief instructions to the model. No encouraging ‘Baby, do it’. No music. Just concentration. Be it the thirties, when models had to hold their poses, or the nineties, when photography is a matter of one thousandth of a second, the goal remains the same:’ To make people look good.’ There was no mention of the word elegance during our conversations in Long Island and Manhattan.

Excerpt from Horst: Sixty Years of Photography

He wasn’t interested in technical equipment (aside from the lighting) and was certainly no camera fetishist. 

At the beginning of his career, he worked with a large-format studio camera. Later on, he used Rolleiflex and Hasselblad medium format cameras, which gave him more versatility. He used no filters. 

Picture Perfect

Horst didn’t photograph the person, but rather the pose. His instructions to models are remembered as being brief and to the point.

He was an old man by the time I worked with him. I was aware that he used to be a really big photographer, in the caliber of Avedon and Penn, but it seemed old-fashioned in that he physically helped you to do the pose – he walked up and took my hand and put it on my hip. He knew exactly what he wanted.

Renée Toft Simonsen, Former Vogue model

Whomever Horst photographed, he beguiled. It was magic to watch him at portrait sittings. When the rapport had jelled, he would ask for a Dubonnet or a Campari, depending on his mood, and then start clicking away with his Rolleiflex or Hasselblad. Even the stiffest and most fidgety of subjects overcame any natural shyness and fear of the camera in Horst’s presence because he made each one feel appreciated and beautiful. The whole process was so much like a seduction that often other people in the room felt like intruders – or voyeurs.

Barbara Plumb, Introduction to Horst: Interiors

He also believed that group photographs have no place in fashion photography, and should be used mainly for advertising work.

Making the Image

Because he was so meticulous, his photo sessions could be slow, sometimes even lasting days. 

Horst was a craftsman, who was only interested in the creation of an image. The darkroom was not his domain. 

Once the picture was done, he had no interest in the printing process, leaving instead to experienced retouchers. Many times, unable to decide which was the best shot, he would supply clients with the contact sheet, and let them decide what images to use. 

The video below provides a rare look behind the scenes at American Vogue in the ’40s. Skip ahead to 21 seconds to see a 60-second clip of Horst at work in the Condé Nast studios in New York.

Horst’s Lighting Technique

Horst’s trademark is his dramatic lighting, which was heavily influenced by the works of great painters such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Vermeer.

He was known for his use of chiaroscuro – the use of strong contrasts between light and dark. His use of circular backlighting and silhouette was his own innovation and was established as his signature style. 

Horst’s Paris studio was equipped with around 20 large floodlights and spotlights. He preferred to use spotlights to emphasize the important points of a dress. 

He never used strobes, saying later that strobes, “show everything too clearly,” leaving no mystery to the image.

Master of Studio Light

He often took up to two days to perfect a lighting set-up. His setups became so complex that he could never recreate them.

First, the set has to be right. Next comes the lighting. Then the model gets dressed and moves around the set, allowing Horst to familiarize himself with her walk. It is the lighting which creates the atmosphere.

He uses a ceiling spotlight. That lends the photo something constructivist, a touch of Art Deco. The Vogue people were constantly demanding more drama. He gets dramatic effects with spotlights, as on a stage. He usually uses four, but naturally, there are no fixed rules.

[Horst] employs shutters in front of the spotlights to either reduce or open up the light, to bring out the detail of a dress. He has little interest in flat light. He wants to use light to change things, to shape them, by highlighting a profile, a structure, a detail of a silhouette.

Excerpt from Horst Portraits: 60 Years of Style

Horst’s Marlene Dietrich Portrait

One of his most famous portraits is of Marlene Dietrich, taken in 1942. She complained that the lighting setup wasn’t to her satisfaction, but he used it anyway. Dietrich liked the results so much that she ordered a dozen prints. 

She came to his studio in a ‘Lookout, here I come’ manner – and demanded the special lighting which Josef von Sternberg had discovered and which highlighted her cheekbones-her old trick. But Horst photographed the way he wanted. He is a hypnotist. Barely were the contacts ready than she ordered dozens of prints. For he had succeeded in rendering her face young and unwrinkled, with a flattering nose. The light came from below. For Horst, the matter was there by closed.

Excerpt from Portraits: 60 Years of Style

Other Horst Resources

Recommended Horst P Horst Books

Disclaimer: Photogpedia is an Amazon Associate and earns from qualifying purchases

•  His Work and His World, 1984
•  Portraits: 60 Years of Style, 2001 (The first Horst book you should buy)
•  Horst P Horst, 2019

Horst P Horst Videos

Visions and Images: Horst (1981)

Vogue 100: Nick Knight and Robin Muir on Horst P. Horst

Horst in Colour (Victoria and Albert Museum)

Horst P Horst Photos

For more Horst photographs, visit the Horst P Horst website or check out his profile at ArtNet.

Recommended Reading

To learn more about Horst P Horst, we recommend visiting the Victoria and Albert Museum website. The V.A. has a section dedicated to the incredible work of the master photographer.

Fact Check

With each Photographer profile post, we strive to be accurate and fair. If you see something that doesn’t look right, then contact us and we’ll update the post.

If there is anything else you would like to add about Horst’s work then send us an email: hello(at)photogpedia.com

Link to Photogpedia

If you’ve enjoyed the article or you’ve found it useful then we would be grateful if you could link back to us or share online through social media, forums, blogs etc. This article took 7 days to research and write. Sharing the link takes less than 2 minutes and doesn’t cost anything.

Finally, don’t forget to subscribe to our monthly newsletter, and follow us on Instagram and Twitter.

Sources

Introduction to Horst P Horst, Victoria and Albert Museum 
In Pictures: Fashion photographer Horst, BBC Website, 2014
Created Hard-Edged Glamour Photos of 1930s Fashions, Los Angeles Times, November 1999 
Staleywise Gallery, Website Biography
Horst P Horst Website, Biography
Vogue Archive
Visions and Images: Horst, 1981

Horst in Colour, Victoria and Albert Museum
His Work and His World, 1984
Interiors, Barbara Plumb, 1993
Portraits: 60 Years of Style, 2001
Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography, 2005
Horst P Horst, 2019

The post Horst P Horst: The Photographer of Style appeared first on Photogpedia.

Cartier-Bresson did for photography what Picasso did for painting. He was a photographic visionary who helped changed the way we see photographs and was a pioneer of the street photography genre. He also co-founded the legendary photo agency, Magnum Photos.

His working methods and abilities are part of photographic lore: he had an uncanny talent for remaining invisible to his subjects; his compositions were perfectly balanced and he rarely cropped his images; and he had an instinct for capturing the most telling moments from a scene.

Cartier-Bresson’s concept of the “decisive moment” – a fleeting meaningful instant captured by the camera – shaped modern-day street photography and inspired generations of photojournalists.

When a photographer raises his camera at something that is taking place in front of him, there is one moment at which the elements in motion are in balance. Photography must seize upon this moment.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Cartier-Bresson’s black-and-white photos are among the most iconic in photography, including his powerful images of some of the major political moments in the 20th century.

He photographed Gandhi literally minutes before he was assassinated, and he stayed to cover the funeral. In 1954, he was the first Western photographer to be allowed to photograph in the Soviet Union after the death of dictator Josef Stalin and the end of his brutal rule.

He had a knack for being in the right part of the world just as history was unfolding. He said his intention was to “trap life” and “preserve it in the act of being lived.”

Among his best-known photographs were a man and his reflection frozen in time as he leaps across a giant puddle behind Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris, two men at a peephole in Brussels, and a cyclist speeding around a curve in the shape of the spiraling staircase from which Cartier-Bresson took the image.

Often the scene is quite ordinary – a woman eating in a cafe, children playing, lovers kissing. But in Cartier-Bresson’s pictures, it takes on a significance that touches everyone.

Most photographers (at the highest level) take maybe two or three great photographs in their career, Cartier-Bresson shot well over a dozen. With apparent ease, he succeeded in producing one masterpiece after another.

Cartier-Bresson is the greatest photographer of the 20th century. He is like Tolstoy was to literature. His pictures go beyond any breaking down of what a picture is supposed to be, or any intellectualizing about it. If you had a career that had five great photographs, that would be pretty good. He has made hundreds of them. Nobody else has that track record.

Richard Avedon

In this article, we will take a closer look at Cartier-Bresson’s career and photography style. This will be another long article, so feel free to use the table of contents below, and skip ahead to whatever section interests you.

If you find any of the information helpful then we would be grateful if you could share a link to the article through the usual channels (websites, forums, social media, etc).

Editor note: This Henri Cartier-Bresson article took over 3 weeks to research and write – sharing takes just a couple of minutes and doesn’t cost you anything. Thanks for your support in advance.

Henri Cartier-Bresson Biography

Name: Henri Cartier-Bresson
Nationality: French
Genre: Street, Photojournalism, Documentary, Portraiture
Born: August 22, 1908 – Chanteloup, Seine-et-Marne, France
Died: August 3, 2004 (95 Years) – Montjustin, France

Early Life

Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup, Seine-et-Marne, on August 22, 1908. He was the oldest of five children born to Andre Cartier-Bresson, a wealthy textile manufacturer, and Marthe Leverdier, a daughter of cotton merchants and wealthy landowners.

Bresson was educated in Paris at the Lyce ́e Condorcet. He first became interested in photography as a teenager, after seeing the photographs of Romanian photographer, Martin Munkacsi.

Cartier-Bresson said the first photograph that overwhelmed him was Munkasci’s photograph of three African children running towards the water of Lake Tanganyika. That image made him realize, “that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant.”

In 1927, he studied painting under Andre ́Lhote, who had been an early practitioner of Cubism. Cartier-Bresson stated that Lhote taught him everything he knew about photography including the importance of composition. He also spent some time studying with the portrait painter Emile Blanche.

Cartier-Bresson then moved to England and studied English literature and art at Cambridge University, but dropped out after one year. He returned to France in 1929 and was given his first camera, a Box Brownie from the American expatriate Harry Crosby.

In 1930, Bresson began his military service with the French Army and was stationed at Le Bourget, near Paris.

Africa, Hunting and Near Death Experience

Upon his discharge, filled with poetry and literature and looking for adventure, he set off for West Africa and the French colony of Coˆte d’Ivoire to hunt.

Several months after arriving in Africa, he contracted blackwater fever (a severe malaria infection) and almost died. Later when describing the experience, he said a witch doctor got him out of a coma and while he was sick, he had sent a postcard to his grandfather detailing his funeral arrangements.

In 1931, Cartier-Bresson returned to Marseilles to recuperate. The trip to Africa wasn’t a complete waste. Learning how to hunt would prove useful for his photography and waiting for the decisive moment.

Cartier-Bresson would later say, “I adore shooting photography; it’s like being a hunter. But some hunters are vegetarians – which is my relationship to photography.” Although he loved the process of making photos, for Cartier-Bresson the chase was always better than the catch.

Enter Photography

That same year, he acquired his first professional camera, a small, lightweight Leica with a 50mm lens. He found the camera gave him a sense of independence and unity with his environment and often referred to it as an extension of his eye.

As he was independently wealthy, and living off a generous allowance from his father, Cartier-Bresson would spend most of his days roaming the streets experimenting with his new passion.

I had blackwater fever in Africa and was now obliged to convalesce. I went to Marseille. A small allowance enabled me to get along, and I worked with enjoyment. I had just discovered the Leica. It became the extension of my eye, and I have never been separated from it since I found it.

I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to “trap” life– to preserve life in the act of living. Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was unrolling before my eyes.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Not long after purchasing the camera, he shot one of his most recognizable images, Behind Gare St. Lazar.

He stuck his camera between the slats of a fence near the St Lazare railway station in Paris at the right moment and captured the figure of a leaping man, which mirrored the dancers on the posters on the wall behind him.

Over the next few years, Cartier-Bresson photographed widely across Europe and the United States and was soon given assignments by magazines such as Life and Harper’s Bazaar.

In 1932 he was given his first exhibition in America by Julien Levy, a friend of Jean Cocteau. While in New York, he met Paul Strand, who at that time was making films.

Filmmaking and Renoir

Inspired by Strand, when he returned to France Cartier-Bresson secured the position of a second assistant on Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country and The Rules of the Game.

He was also involved in a propaganda film the famous director made for the French Communist Party that denounced France’s prominent families in France, Cartier-Bresson’s own among them.

On his experience with Renoir, Cartier-Bresson said “Jean knew very well that I would never make a feature film. He saw that I had no imagination.”

The War Years

In 1940, with the German invasion of France, Cartier-Bresson, who was serving in the Army’s Film and Photo Unit was captured and taken prisoner. He spent 35 months in prisoner-of-war camps, escaping twice, only to be recaptured.

On his third escape attempt, in 1943, he succeeded, and he hid on a farm in Touraine until French Resistance fighters secured false papers that allowed him to travel in France. Back in Paris, he once again took up photography as a member of the Resistance.

He established a photo division within the French underground to document the German occupation as well as their eventual retreat, an experience which would later shape his ideas about the photo agency, Magnum when it was established in 1947.

Post-War

Following France’s liberation in 1944, the United States Office of War Information hired Cartier-Bresson to direct a film about the homecoming of French prisoners of war and deportees, La Retour (The Return).

Cartier-Bresson then traveled to New York City, where a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, conceived as a tribute to his work, on the belief that he had been killed in the war, had been planned.

While in the United States, he decided to take some time out to travel and see the country. During this trip, he took signature images such as Harlem, Easter Sunday, 1947, which shows an African-American woman wearing a satin-flower-filled hat framed within the architectural details of a modest brick structure.

Magnum Photos

Returning to Paris in 1947, Cartier-Bresson learned that his associates Robert Capa, David Seymour (Chim), William Vandivert, and George Rodger, had planned to form a cooperative photo agency with offices in New York, Paris, and other world capitals.

Dubbed Magnum Photos, the group named Cartier-Bresson to their board of directors, knowing that he was like-minded and aware of his considerable prestige. The co-operative, the first of its kind, was set up to give freelance photographers greater editorial and financial control of their work.

He was tapped to be in charge of Far Eastern assignments; and his insistence on small format cameras, no supplementary equipment such as flash, tripods, or telephoto lens and the integrity of the frame as photographed – no darkroom manipulation – became the gold standard for postwar photojournalism as well as being highly influential on fine art photography.

Photojournalism

The late 1940s saw the rise of Cartier-Bresson as an international photojournalist. Cartier-Bresson himself, however, strongly refused the title.

Journalism has kept me from going stale, and through photo assignments, I am able to see many new places, but I am not a journalist. I simply sniff around and take the temperature of a place.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

For Magnum, he traveled to China, India – where he photographed Gandhi minutes before he was assassinated – and Indonesia, photographing political events and the people in their streets and homes.

Recognition and The Decisive Moment

By 1952, Cartier-Bresson finally received recognition in his home country.

His first book, Images a`la sauvette (with its English title of The Decisive Moment,) with cover art by Matisse, was published. The book included a large collection of his images, and he elaborates on his techniques and approach to photography. The book remains one of the most influential photography books of all-time.

After The Decisive Moment, he began a long collaboration with eminent fine arts publisher Robert Delpire. This included a book on Balinese theatre, Les Danses a`Bali, featuring text by Antonin Artaud. His book Les Europe ́ens, with cover art by painter Joan Miro’, was published as well.

In 1955, he became the first photographer to be exhibited at the Louvre in France.

On Assignment

One of Cartier-Bresson’s favorite assignments was Moscow in 1954. He was the first foreign photographer to be allowed entrance to the USSR since the death of Stalin the following year. The French photographer set about capturing daily life in his usual candid style. The assignment resulted in a remarkable photo series that was published in Life in 1955.

The 1960s were again a period of intense international travel. He returned to Mexico, where he had made one of his first photographic forays as part of an ethnographic team in the early 1930s. On assignment for Life magazine, he traveled to Cuba during a time of high tension between that country and the United States. He visited Japan and again traveled to India.

Retirement from Photography

Cartier-Bresson ended his relationship with Magnum Photos in 1966. He later said that he had stayed with the agency “two years too long.”

In the late ’60s, he retired from professional photography altogether and focussed instead on documentary film projects. He believed that still photography and its use in pictorial magazines had been superseded by news coverage on television. His films include Impressions of California (1969) and Southern Exposures (1971).

Later Years and Painting

After divorcing his wife of 30 years, the Javanese dancer Ratna Mohini, Cartier-Bresson married the Magnum photographer Martine Franck in 1970.

He recalled in an interview, the time he visited a fortune teller:

There are certain things you can’t just make up. In 1932, she told me that I would marry someone who would not be from India, or from China, but would also not be white. And in 1937 I married a Javanese woman. This fortune teller also told me that the marriage would be difficult and that when I was old, I would marry someone much younger than I and would be very happy.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

After 1974, he photographed very little, and then often secretly, which he had perfected during his long career as a photojournalist. Working with a small camera that he would often further minimize by covering with black tape any metal parts which might reflect light and catch the eye.

Cartier-Bresson returned to his first love of painting and drawing, and spent his remaining days at his studio near the Place des Victoires or in his apartment overlooking the Tuileries, from which he could see the same views that Monet and Pissarro had painted a century earlier.

Cartier-Bresson’s Legacy

Henri Cartier-Bresson died in the south of France on 5 August 2004 at the age of 95.

In his lifetime he received an extraordinary number of awards, prizes and honorary doctorates. His work has also been exhibited in some of the world’s finest galleries including the Louvre, Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, and The National Portrait Gallery.

In 2003, shortly before his 95th birthday, Cartier-Bresson along with his wife, Martine and daughter, Mélanie established the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris to preserve the legacy of the iconic photographer. The opening was accompanied by a retrospective exhibition at the French National Library that opened in April 2003.

Photography Style

• Candid, unobtrusive
• Patient, the decisive moment
• Composition: Use of geometry, shape, contrasts, rarely crops
• Black and white imagery
• Storytelling, continuity
• Minimalistic, one camera, one lens

Cartier-Bresson Photography Masterclass

The aim of this section is to provide an introduction to Cartier-Bresson’s photography techniques, which will hopefully inspire you in some way or another.

The following quote from HCB provides an invaluable insight into his photography philosophy:

For me, the camera is a sketchbook, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Below you’ll find extracts from various books and interviews with Cartier-Bresson along with a short paragraph to summarise key points.

The Decisive Moment

The phrase The Decisive Moment was first introduced in 1952, as the title of the English edition of Cartier-Bresson’s book, Images a`la sauvette. The French title of the book actually translates as ‘images on the run’ and not the decisive moment as many people assume.

The phrase was actually taken from the 17th-century quote from Cardinal de Retz and is used by Cartier-Bresson in the introduction of the book.

There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment and the masterpiece of good ruling is to know and seize this moment.

Cardinal de Retz

So what does the decisive moment mean? Here is another excerpt from the introduction, which summarises Cartier-Bresson’s own idea of the decisive moment:

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression. Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Working the Scene

The phrase is often used to describe an image that illustrates action, emotion, and the entire story in a single frame.

Your eye must see a composition of an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

The truth is that Cartier-Bresson didn’t just take one frame, he would find his composition (or story) and “work the scene” taking multiple images (sometimes up to 20 exposures).

Instead of just one decisive moment, there can be up to a dozen decisive moments even within the same scene.

While working, a photographer must reach a precise awareness of what he is trying to do. Sometimes you have the feeling that you have already taken the strongest possible picture of a particular situation or scene; nevertheless, you find yourself compulsively shooting, because you cannot be sure in advance exactly how the situation, the scene, is going to unfold.

You must stay with the scene, just in case the elements of the situation shoot off from the core again. At the same time, it’s essential to avoid shooting like a machine-gunner and burdening yourself with useless recordings which clutter your memory and spoil the exactness of the reportage as a whole.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Cartier-Bresson was a true observer who recognized the significance or the potential of an event.

He would first find his composition then he would wait for something to enter the frame or a moment to happen to complete the picture. He would often say, “he did not take the picture, rather the picture took him.”

He also liked to compare himself to a fisherman – the only difference is his catch was a moment in time.

Sometimes it happens that you stall, delay, wait for something to happen. Sometimes you have the feeling that here are all the makings of a picture – except for just one thing that seems to be missing. But what one thing? Perhaps someone suddenly walks into your range of view. You follow his progress through the viewfinder. You wait and wait, and then finally you press the button – and you depart with the feeling (though you don’t know why) that you’ve really got something.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

That’s not to say, he’d wait hours for the right image, he would constantly adapt and respond to the changing circumstances.

My contact sheets may be compared to the way you drive a nail in a plank. First, you give several light taps to build up a rhythm and align the nail with the wood. Then, much more quickly, and with as few strokes as possible, you hit the nail forcefully on the head and drive it in.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Once he knew he had his shot, he then moved on. Sometimes though, you don’t have the luxury of spending time working a scene and in that situation, as HCB explains below, you need to act quickly.

When something happens, you have to be extremely swift. Like an animal and a prey — vroom! You grasp it and people don’t notice that you have taken it.

Very often in a different situation, you can take one picture. You cannot take two. Take a picture and look like a fool, look like a tourist. But if you take two, three pictures, you got trouble. It’s good training to know how far you can go.

When the fruit is ripe, you have to pluck it. Quick! With no indulgence over yourself, but daring. I enjoy very much seeing a good photographer working. There’s an elegance, just like in a bullfight.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Hunting for Photos

Cartier-Bresson would only keep his images if every element of his image (background, subject and composition) were perfect. The subjects of his photos weren’t as important as the spirit of a place, or the moment he was trying to capture.

He traveled extensively and photographed many places including India, Europe, China, Africa and the United States. When he worked on overseas assignments he would take time to familiarise himself with the country.

For example, when he worked on an India assignment, he spent a year getting to know the people, while fully immersing himself in the Indian culture.

Although it is great to shoot street photography in your backyard, it is great to travel as often as you can. Explore different countries and cultures, and it will help inspire your photography and open your eyes.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Trusting your Intuition

That’s not to say that he didn’t shoot in his own backyard – many of his greatest images were taken on the streets of Paris.

Sometimes, the best photography can often be found where you live, you just need to remain as Cartier-Bresson liked to say “lucid” and open to opportunity.

Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It’s drowning yourself, dissolving yourself, and then sniff, sniff, sniff – being sensitive to coincidence. You can’t go looking for it; you can’t want it, or you won’t get it. First you must lose yourself. Then it happens.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

When selecting subjects, it is often the small details or events that make the best photographs:

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a leitmotiv. We see and show the world around us, but it is an event itself which provokes the organic rhythm of forms.

Cartier-Bresson’s greatest skill perhaps was his ability to thrive on accident or to recognize a situation that held the promise of a happy accident.

His iconic photograph, Behind the Gare de Saint-Lazare (1932) is a perfect example of a happy accident.

While passing a construction site behind the Paris train station, the photographer stuck his lens through the wooden planks of a temporary fence, and without looking through the viewfinder, clicked his shutter and produced one of his most famous photos.

The Art of the Story

Cartier-Bresson believed that it was rare that a single image could show a whole story and a successful picture story is dependant on the sequencing of several complementary images to support the main image of the story.

The elements which, together, can strike sparks from a subject, are often scattered – either in terms of space or time – and bringing them together by force is ”stage management,“ and, I feel, contrived.

But if it is possible to make pictures of the ”core“ as well as the struck-off sparks of the subject, this is a picture-story. The page serves to reunite the complementary elements which are dispersed throughout several photographs.

Related Article: Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Quotes

While shooting, the photographer must build a story, else his work will lack continuity. Unlike the writer, he cannot change: what happens at the decisive moment is recorded forever.

The picture-story involves a joint operation of the brain, the eye, and the heart. The objective of this joint operation is to depict the content of some event which is in the process of unfolding, and to communicate impressions.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

His best work is remarkable for the fact that he completely ignores photographic traditions and the usual dramatic props of the photojournalist.

For instance, when Cartier-Bresson covered the coronation of George VI in London in 1937, instead of photographing the procession like every other photojournalist, he turned his camera on the crowd instead.

Work for Yourself and the Story

Cartier-Bresson believed that the story is just as much about you and how you see the world.

You have to know in which framework you have to tell your story for the magazine, but you must not work for the magazine… you work for yourself, and the story.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

He wasn’t interested in staged or studio photography and preferred a more candid approach.

’Manufactured’ or staged photography does not concern me. And if I make a judgment it can only be on a psychological or sociological level. There are those who take photographs arranged beforehand and those who go out to discover the image and seize it.

If you’re looking for more of an insight into Cartier-Bresson’s working methods on assignment, then I recommend reading Ishu Patel’s, My Time with Henri Cartier-Bresson. Here’s a small extract from the article:

Over the years he had simplified the technical part of photography to suit his unobtrusive shooting style and still create a technically perfect photograph.

For instance, he judged the light by eye, although he carried a small light meter in his pants pocket. Since he mostly shot in shaded areas he set his F stop at 5.6 or 8 and shutter speed at 1/60th to 1/125th of a second, so he could quickly pay attention to his subject matter. He made it clear that, “technique is not so important to me, but people and their activities are”.

He said, “Think about the photograph before and after, but not during. The secret is to take your time but also to be very quick”. In other words there was to be no cropping of the image later, no dodging or other tricks used in printing. The image captured on film had to stand on its own merits.

Ishu Patel

Editing and Post-Processing

Cartier-Bresson rarely processed film himself and would often send his films to someone he trusted. The same goes for printing. This allowed him to spend more time out shooting instead of in the darkroom.

He says that an image shouldn’t be over-processed and that you should only set out to recreate the mood of the scene you captured.

During the process of enlarging, it is essential to re-create the values and mood of the time the picture was taken; or even to modify the print so as to bring it into line with the intentions of the photographer at the moment he shot it.

Cartier-Bresson believed that if you shoot a bad photo, no amount of post-processing (darkroom work in his day) can make it any better.

The Editing Process

When editing his work, Cartier-Bresson often looked at his contact sheets or prints upside down, so he could judge the merit of his images as a composition, rather than being influenced by content and subject.

For photographers, there are two kinds of selection to be made, and either of them can lead to eventual regrets. There is the selection we make when we look through the viewfinder at the subject; and there is the one we make after the films have been developed and printed. After developing and printing, you must go about separating the pictures which, though they are all right, aren’t the strongest.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Cartier-Bresson also shares why it is important to learn from our failures:

When it’s too late, then you know with a terrible clarity exactly where you failed; and at this point, you often recall the telltale feeling you had while you were actually making the pictures.

Was it a feeling of hesitation due to uncertainty? Was it because of some physical gulf between yourself and the unfolding event? Was it simply that you did not take into account a certain detail in relation to the whole setup? Or was it (and this is more frequent) that your glance became vague, your eye wandered off?

Mastery of Composition

Cartier-Bresson believed that a composition should serve to highlight the subject and anything that may distract the viewer should be eliminated from the frame.

If a photograph is to communicate its subject in all its intensity, the relationship of form must be rigorously established. Photography implies the recognition of a rhythm in the world of real things. What the eye does is to find and focus on the particular subject within the mass of reality; what the camera does is simply to register upon film the decision made by the eye.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Though his photographs may appear to be spontaneous, in reality, his compositions are highly calculated. To achieve this he used a number of techniques from art including the Golden Ratio (also known as the Golden Rule).

Cartier-Bresson says that while we should always think about composition when it comes to the actual shooting of the image, the photographer should always use intuition. Cartier-Bresson shoots what feels right, not what conforms to compositional rules.

Composition must be one of our constant preoccupations, but at the moment of shooting it can stem only from our intuition, for we are out to capture the fugitive moment, and all the interrelationships involved are on the move.

The Secret to Great Composition: Geometry

When Charlie Rose interviewed Cartier-Bresson, he asked him, “What makes a great composition?” Cartier-Bresson simply replied, “Geometry.”

My passion has never been for photography ”in itself,“ but for the possibility – through forgetting yourself – of recording in a fraction of a second the emotion of the subject, and the beauty of the form; that is, a geometry awakened by what’s offered. The photographic shot is one of my sketch pads.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

If you look at any of his images, you’ll notice whenever possible he makes use of geometric lines and shapes (triangles, circles, and squares) using them as frames within frames or to draw the viewer into the image.

In order to “give a meaning” to the world, one has to feel oneself involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, a discipline of mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry – it is by great economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression. One must always take photographs with the greatest respect for the subject and for oneself.

The Golden Ratio

So what compositional tools did Cartier-Bresson use? He mainly used a technique called the Golden Ratio, also known as the Golden Rule.

Not only did he use it when framing his shot, but he also used it when analyzing his images during the editing stage.

In applying the Golden Rule, the only pair of compasses at the photographer’s disposal is his own pair of eyes. Any geometrical analysis, any reducing of the picture to a schema, can be done only (because of its very nature) after the photograph has been taken, developed, and printed – and then it can be used only for a post-mortem examination of the picture.

I hope we will never see the day when photo shops sell little schema grills to clamp onto our viewfinders; and the Golden Rule will never be found etched on our ground glass.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Now you might be asking yourself what is the “Golden Rule”? To answer that fully it would take another article, but here’s a quick summary:

The golden ratio, also known as Phi, is a mathematical tool used to achieve visual harmony and balance in a composition. To many, it’s the most pleasing way of arranging lines and shapes in a composition.

This technique was used by some of the greatest artists of all time, and the calculation has been found in their most famous works. Leonardo da Vinci was an artist who used the golden ratio technique extensively.

Like the rule of thirds, this mathematical concept can be applied to photography to make images more visually appealing to the viewer.

Cropping

Cartier-Bresson is one of the original purists that insisted on never cropping his images and printing the whole negative.

He believed that whenever you took a photo, it should always be composed in the viewfinder. If he wasn’t happy with the framing or composition, he would disregard the image.

If you start cutting or cropping a good photograph, it means death to the geometrically correct interplay of proportions. Besides, it very rarely happens that a photograph which was feebly composed can be saved by reconstruction of its composition under the darkroom’s enlarger; the integrity of vision is no longer there.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

The photographer, Eve Arnold, an old friend and colleague at Magnum, maintains that Cartier–Bresson would crop his photographs if it made a better image. This was the case with Behind Gare St. Lazar, which is one of only a few images that he allowed to be cropped.

Portrait Lessons

Although Henri Cartier-Bresson is famous for his candid style of photography, he did also take a number of portraits in his career.

He always preferred to take his sitters’ portrait at home. When asked how long the session would take, he liked to answer, “Longer than the dentist but shorter than the psychoanalyst.”

If the photographer is to have a chance of achieving a true reflection of a person’s world – which is as much outside him as inside him – it is necessary that the subject of the portrait should be in a situation normal to him.

We must respect the atmosphere which surrounds the human being, and integrate into the portrait the individual’s habitat – for man, no less than animals, has his habitat.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Another important portrait lesson is to remain unobtrusive, so the subject forgets about the camera. He also recommends not using any flashy equipment, which can intimidate the subject:

Above all, the sitter must be made to forget about the camera and the photographer who is handling it. Complicated equipment and light reflectors and various other items of hardware are enough, to my mind, to prevent the birdie from coming out.

Get to Know Your Subject

Next, Cartier-Bresson provides an insight into capturing the emotion of the human face and the importance of getting to know your subject.

What is there more fugitive and transitory than the expression on a human face? The first impression given by a particular face is often the right one; but the photographer should try always to substantiate the first impression by ”living“ with the person concerned.

Usually, when taking a portrait, I feel like putting a few questions just to get the reaction of a person. It’s difficult to talk at the same time that you observe with intensity the face of somebody. But still, you must establish a contact of some sort.

Whereas with Ezra Pound, I stood in front of him for maybe an hour and a half in utter silence. We were looking at each other in the eye. He was rubbing his fingers. I took maybe altogether one good photograph, four other possible, and two which were not interesting. That makes about six pictures in an hour and a half. And no embarrassment on either side.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Cartier-Bresson explains why it’s difficult to take portraits for customers and finding the right balance.

The decisive moment and psychology, no less than camera position, are the principal factors in the making of a good portrait.

It seems to me it would be pretty difficult to be a portrait photographer for customers who order and pay since, apart from a Maecenas or two, they want to be flattered, and the result is no longer real.

The sitter is suspicious of the objectivity of the camera, while the photographer is after an acute psychological study of the sitter.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Finally, he says that a portrait is not only a reflection of the sitter but also the photographer.

It is true, too, that a certain identity is manifest in all the portraits taken by one photographer. The photographer is searching for identity of his sitter, and also trying to fulfil an expression of himself. The true portrait emphasizes neither the suave nor the grotesque, but reflects the personality.

What Camera Did Henri Cartier-Bresson Use?

Leica M3 and 50mm Leica Summicron

This was Cartier-Bresson’s setup for most of his life. For landscapes, he also used a wide-angle and telephoto lens.

I think with the 50 mm you can cover a large number of things. Sometimes, especially for landscape, you need a 90 mm because it cuts all the foreground which is not that interesting. But this you don’t decide beforehand… I’m going to work with such a lens… no.

It depends on the subject. The subject guides you, it’s there. Your frame, you see it, it’s a recognition of a certain geometrical order, as well as of the subject.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

He started with a Leica II and III with Elmar 50mm before making the switch. He also used a Zeiss Sonnar 50mm at times.

We don’t need very big equipment. Practically I work all the time with a 50 mm, a very wide open lens because I never know if I’m going to be in a dark room taking a picture in this moment and outside in full bright sun the next moment.

Film and Sharpness

Cartier-Bresson didn’t believe in using flash and he famously covered his camera’s body in black tape to make it less conspicuous. The 35mm Leica camera allowed him to photograph without attracting attention.

Cartier-Bresson worked exclusively with black and white film. He never took to color film, despite a few brave attempts in the late ’50s when working on an assignment at the magazine’s request.

Here’s what he had to say on why we shouldn’t concern ourselves with the sharpness of an image (or lenses for that matter).

I am constantly amused by the notion that some people have about photographic technique – a notion which reveals itself in an insatiable craving for sharpness of images.

Is this the passion of an obsession? Or do these people hope, by this trompe l’oeil technique, to get to closer grips with reality? In either case, they are just as far away from the real problem as those of that other generation which used to endow all its photographic anecdotes with an intentional unsharpness such as it was deemed to be ”artistic.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Other Cartier-Bresson Resources

Recommended Henri Cartier-Bresson Books

Disclaimer: Photogpedia is an Amazon Associate and earns from qualifying purchases.

• Henri Cartier-Bresson: The man, the image and the world
• The Decisive Moment
• Henri Cartier-Bresson: Scrapbook
• The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers

Henri Cartier-Bresson Videos

Pen, Brush and Camera

Interview with Charlie Rose (2002)

Henri Cartier Bresson – Just Plain Love Documentary

Henri Cartier-Bresson Photos

Looking for more Henri Cartier-Bresson photos? Check out the Cartier-Bresson galleries at MoMA and Magnum Photos.

Recommended Reading

Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation
My Time with Cartier-Bresson, Ishu Patel
Interview with Shiela Turner-Seed, Aperture

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Sources

Interviews and Conversations, 1951–1998
Interview with Shiela Turner-Seed, Aperture, 1973
Henri Cartier-Bresson Obituary, The Times, 2004
My Time with Cartier-Bresson, Ishu Patel, 2008
Living and Looking, New York Times, 2013
Henri Cartier-Bresson profile, Museum of Modern Art
History of Magnum, Magnum Photos
Henri Cartier-Bresson profile, Magnum Photos

Famous Photographers Tell How: Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1958
Henri Cartier-Bresson: Just Plain Love
Pen, Brush and Camera Documentary
Interview with Charlie Rose, 2002

India: Henri Cartier Bresson, 1988
Icons Of Photography The 20th Century, 1999
The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers, 2004
Henri Cartier Bresson: The man, the image and the world, 2006
Encyclopedia of Twentieth-century Photography, 2005
Henri Cartier Bresson: Scrapbook, 2006
The Decisive Moment, 1952 (2018 edition)
Henri Cartier-Bresson: A Biography, 2012
Masters of Photography, Aperture, 2015

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She is famous for her black-and-white images of marginalized people in society such as giants, dwarves, circus performers, transgender people and nudists. 

The unconventional subject matter of her portraits, as well as those photographs of supposedly ordinary people, were controversial at the time of their making. 

Arbus would spend hours (sometimes days) with her subjects, photographing them in their own space, which is what gave her photography a striking honesty and intimate quality. 

In 1971, at the age of 48, Arbus took her own life, thus unknowingly adding herself (in the minds of her critics) to the category of damaged people that appear in her images. 

Although Arbus is often criticized for objectifying her subjects, the power of her images remains. Her original and unsettling photo essays of characters on the fringes of society remain truly unique.

Related: 35 Diane Arbus Quotes to Inspire You

For me the subject of a picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated. 

Diane Arbus

This article aims to provide a brief overview of Diane Arbus’s career, work and photography style. 

If you find it helpful or informative then we would be grateful if you could share with other photographers through the usual channels.

About Diane Arbus

Name: Diane Arbus
Nationality: American
Genre: Photojournalism, Documentary, Street, Portraiture
Born: March 14, 1923 – New York City, New York
Died: July 26, 1971 (48 years) – New York City, New York

Diane Arbus Biography

Diane Nemerov was born into a wealthy Jewish family who owned a successful fifth Avenue department store named Russek’s in New York City. 

At the age of 14, she met Allan Arbus, who was working in the advertising department of Russek’s. Four years later, in 1941, the couple married. They would later have two daughters: Doon and Amy.

Allan bought Diane her first camera and the couple turned their bathroom into a darkroom. Once the two were married, Diane started taking her photography more seriously and enrolled in classes with the photographer, Berenice Abbot. 

Commercial Photography

In 1946, after the war, the Arbuses started a commercial photography business, with Allan working as the photographer and Diane as art director. Shortly after, their images featured in major fashion magazines such as Glamour, Seventeen, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue.

In 1956, Diane studied portrait photography with Lisette Model. Arbus also spent time training with Alexey Brodovitch, teacher and legendary art director of Harper’s Bazaar. 

Freelance Photography

Influenced by Model and with her work heading in a new direction, Diane quit the commercial photography business and began working as a freelance photographer for magazines such as The Sunday Times Magazine and Esquire.

Arbus often visited strange and bizarre locations – like seedy hotels, parks late at night, morgues, circus and freak show acts – to capture both unusual and controversial images, as well as to find subjects for her photo essays.

Arbus was known for going to great lengths to get the photos she wanted and would develop a close bond with her subjects. Her photos of these off-beat subjects made her one of the most unique photographers of the period. 

Diane and Allan separated in 1959; they would divorce ten years later in 1969.

Arbus was associated with several other contemporary photographers of the time – together they were known as the New York School of photographers – such as Robert Frank, Saul Leiter and Garry Winogrand. 

She was also friends with Richard Avedon who she first met whilst studying under Brodovitch.

Arbus spent some time during the ’60s teaching photography at the Cooper Union and the Parsons School of Design in New York and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island. 

Final Years

In 1963, Arbus was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which was renewed in 1966. 

Arbus’s first major exhibition came in a group photography show curated by John Szarkowski, called “New Documents” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967. 

The show also featured the work of other contemporary photographers of the time including Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander. 

Sadly, Arbus also battled with depression throughout her life and was known to have violent mood swings. Two years after divorcing her husband, she tragically took her own life on July 26, 1971.

Legacy

In 1972, just a year after she committed suicide, Diane Arbus became the first American photographer to have photographs exhibited at the Venice Biennale. 

Millions of people viewed traveling exhibitions of her work between the years of 1972 and 1979.

In 2007, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (MoMA) acquired Diane Arbus’s complete archive from the Arbus estate including negatives, contact prints and personal papers (notebooks, correspondence, writings). 

Diane Arbus’s controversial photography received many accolades, as well as much criticism (particular from Susan Sontag) for the exploitation of her subjects.

Although Arbus didn’t want to be known simply as a “photographer of freaks,” this is how she came to be known. Whether she would be as famous today had her life not ended prematurely, we’ll never know… 

One thing is for sure, Diane Arbus was as unique a photographer as the subjects she captured.

Freaks [were] a thing I photographed a lot. It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still adore some of them, I don’t quite mean they’re my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.

Diane Arbus

Recommended Reading: The Art Story: Diane Arbus Biography

Diane Arbus Photography Style

• Photojournalism, documentary
• Photoessay, narrative
• Controversial subjects, searching for the unusual
• Black and white, harsh light on subjects
• Raw, happen-stance
• Confrontational, sometimes mysterious and moody

Diane Arbus’s affinity for imperfection is today legendary. While her pictures may appear to be candid, they were often composed with an emphasis on the visual narrative. 

Although her most famous subjects were those on the fringes of society, such as transvestites, nudists, carnival performers, strippers, dwarves, and other assorted so-called “freaks,” she was equally drawn to subjects such as children, mothers, old people, couples etc.

She photographed her subjects in familiar settings: their homes, in the workplace, on the street, in the park. While she used environmental settings to help show the sitter’s life, she made sure that it didn’t distract from capturing the subject’s personality.

I don’t like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.

Diane Arbus

Arbus wrote extensive text captions for her images. The titles of her images also reflect her interest in telling a story about her subjects: A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y., Man at a parade on Fifth Avenue, N.Y.C., and A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y.(1970).

Diane Arbus Twins

Perhaps one of Diane Arbus’s most recognizable images is “Identical Twins”, Roselle, NJ, 1967.

The girls in the image are wearing identical dark cord dresses with white collars and cuffs, white tights and white headbands in their hair. They stand side by side and look straight into the camera. 

Despite being identical twins, when we study the girls faces, we come to realize that their features are by no means identical. Behind their sameness, and the conformity of a middle-class upbringing, lies a certain discomfort and turmoil. 

Diane Arbus’s biographer, Patricia Bosworth states that the photo of the twins encapsulates the photographer’s vision. Her photos always revolve around the question of identity. Who am I and who are you? The image of the twins expresses the crux of that vision: in freakishness and the freakishness in normality.

What Cameras Did Diane Arbus Use?

Arbus switched from a Nikon F 35mm camera to a twin-lens Rolleiflex medium format camera around 1962, which gave her a little more detail and less grain in her images. In 1964, she started using a twin-lens reflex Mamiya camera with flash. 

I used to make very grainy things. I’d be fascinated by what the grain did because it would make a kind of tapestry of all these little dots… But when I’d been working for a while with all these dots, I suddenly wanted terribly to get through there. I wanted to see the real differences between things… I began to get terribly hyped on clarity. 

Diane Arbus

Use of Flash

Arbus used flash during the day to balance her exposure. She typically used the sun to backlight her subjects and the flash to fill in the shadows on the face. It also meant that she didn’t need to reposition subjects away from the sun.

Her use of flash during the day also gave an unnatural feeling to the pictures. By using the light, without any diffusion, she gave her subjects a certain fun-house presence, picking up the shine on faces in a way that created drama and made them physically grotesque. 

Other Resources

Recommended Diane Arbus Books

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• Revelations (2003)
• Portrait of a Photographer (2017)
• Diane Arbus: A Biography (2006)

Diane Arbus Videos

Masters of Photography: Diane Arbus (1972)

Know of any other good Diane Arbus videos? Message us at hello[at]photogpedia.com with your recommendations.

Diane Arbus Photos

Looking for more Diane Arbus photos? Check out her artist profile on Artsy.net

Fact Check

With each Photographer profile post, we strive to be accurate and fair. If you see something that doesn’t look right, then contact us and we’ll update the post.

If there is anything else you would like to add about Diane Arbus’s work then send us an email: hello(at)photogpedia.com

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Related Articles

Garry Winogrand: Ticket to the Big Show
Richard Avedon: The Million Dollar Man
Cindy Sherman: The Queen of No Identity

Sources

The New Yorker, Diane Arbus Unmasked, 1995
The Art Story, Diane Arbus
Fraenkel gallery, Diane Arbus Biography
MoMA, Diane Arbus Biography
Artsy website, artist profile
The New York Times Magazine, Arbus Reconsidered, 2003
The Smithsonian, A Window into the World of Diane Arbus, 2013

An Aperture Monograph, New York: Aperture Foundation, 1972
Diane Arbus: A Biography, W.W. Norton, 2006
Revelations, Random House, 2003
Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer, Ecco, 2016
Icons of Photography: The 20^th Century, Preste, 1999

Masters of Photography: Diane Arbus, 1972

The post Diane Arbus: A Different Perspective appeared first on Photogpedia.

The multi-award-winning photographer has taken some of the most recognizable images in the history of photography, including his iconic 1984 image Afghan Girl, arguably the most famous portrait of the 20th Century.

His photos have been featured in every major magazine in the world and he has been a member of co-operative photo agency Magnum since 1986.

McCurry began his career as a press photographer in Pennsylvania before traveling to India to work as a freelance photographer.

His coverage of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which he slipped across the border from Pakistan to photograph, won him the Robert Capa Gold Medal.

Since then, he has gone on to take many iconic images that tell stories of people, places, and cultures around the world.

You could call him a photojournalist, documentary photographer, or even a portrait photographer, but McCurry shoots with the simple objective of capturing images that will stay with the viewer for a very long time.

When you look at a Steve McCurry photograph you simply don’t just look at it, instead, you are drawn into it: there’s a sense of mystery and timelessness about his photos that make them unique.

[He] brings you into the photograph… because of the shadow and lack of light perhaps, and also because of the color palette. And once you are in the picture you realize you are caught.

John Echaves, National Geographic

In this article, we’ll look at Steve McCurry’s background, photography style, and share his tips and advice for better photography.

Related: 57 Steve McCurry Quotes to Advance your Photography

As always, if you enjoy the article or find it helpful then we would be grateful if you could share with other photographers on social media, forums, or even your website.

Steve McCurry Biography

Name: Steve McCurry
Nationality: American
Genre: Photojournalism/Documentary, War, Portrait, Travel
Born: April 23, 1950 (Philadelphia, USA)

Early Career

Steve McCurry began his photography journey whilst at Penn State University, where he studied cinematography and film. He started out wanting to be a filmmaker, but after working for the college newspaper, he developed a passion for still photography.

After graduating, McCurry looked for a job in the film industry but ended up getting a job at a local newspaper as a photographer, where he stayed for three years.

When I left I was torn between stills and movie making and could have gone either way. What decided it was that I couldn’t get a job in the film industry, but did manage to get one on a newspaper. I’ve never regretted this decision. 

Steve McCurry

In 1978, he left his job and set off for India for a short self-funded assignment, carrying just a small bag of clothes, another bag full of film, and 2 film cameras.

I researched story ideas before I left and I hit the ground running. I was fascinated with the colour, vibrancy, culture, people, geography and the monsoons in India.

Steve McCurry

Conflict Photography

After eighteen months on the road, he found himself in Pakistan, where he came across Afghan refugees.

While I was up in the north of Pakistan, I met some Afghan refugees who invited me to go into their country and see what was happening…

The story they told him piqued his interest, and he followed them back across the border into Afghanistan to photograph the civil war. However, his journey to the rebel-controlled country was not an easy one.

He disguised himself by growing a full beard and wearing traditional Afghani attire, then snuck across the border through the mountains of Pakistan and into Afghanistan. The Russians invaded in late 1979, and McCurry found himself as the only working photographer on hand to shoot the invasion.

When he left the country, he hid his film inside his clothing – sewn into the folds of his turban and stuffed into his shoes and underwear.

As I was ready to leave, I got very nervous that when I crossed back into Pakistan, my film would be confiscated. So I put my film in my socks and my underwear. I sewed some of the film into my costume and into my turban, so that if I were arrested, I would at least keep my film safe. I wasn’t arrested.

I got a few pictures published in The New York Times. And when the Russians invaded six months later, I had all these pictures that nobody else had. Suddenly major magazines around the world – Paris Match, Stern, Time, Newsweek, and LIFE — were using my pictures.“

Steve McCurry

The resulting photographs – among the first photographic evidence of the conflict – were published in The New York Times, Time Magazine, and other newspapers around the world.

Recognition and Awards

The pictures opened the door for many other assignments and helped McCurry land his first National Geographic assignment in 1980. 

When I crossed the border to Afghanistan in 1979, just in time to document the Russian invasion, I didn’t dream that the country and her people, would have such a profound influence on my work and my life.

McCurry’s Afghanistan photographs won him the Robert Capa Gold Medal in 1980 s – an accolade that commends photographers for their courage and enterprise.

After his critically acclaimed Afghan War coverage, McCurry continued to deliver regular photo reports from international conflicts – including the Iran-Iraq War, Yugoslav civil war, the Cambodian Civil War, the Gulf War and the Lebanese Civil War – while returning again and again to Afghanistan.

In contrast to the more conventional war photographers like Don McCullin, Larry Burrows, and to a lesser extent, James Nachtwey, McCurry’s pictures highlight the human cost of conflict and the effect of war on innocent bystanders.

I look for the unguarded moment, the essential soul peeking out, experience etched on a person’s face. I try to convey what it is like to be that person, a person caught in a broader landscape, that you could call the human condition. 

Steve McCurry

The Afghan Girl

In the 1980s, while photographing at a refugee camp in Afghanistan, McCurry took his best-known photograph – “Afghan Girl” – a powerful portrait of a young girl with haunting green eyes (finally identified in 2002 as Sharbat Gula). 

The image became one of the best-known covers for National Geographic and touchstone in his career.

McCurry snapped the image in a matter of minutes back in December 1984, inside a tent in a refugee camp in Pakistan during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan; but he didn’t record the girl’s name, never imagining the power the picture would have. 

One day in 1984, at the refugee camp very close to Peshawar (Pakistan), I heard voices coming from one of the tents. It was a makeshift school for young girls. I asked the teacher there if I could take photographs.

Her eyes were the first thing that struck me. What interested me in that classroom that morning was actually that particular girl. I photographed other girls, but that was more just trying to position myself so that I could photograph her. She seemed pretty shy, a little bit troubled. I shot a few frames of her.

I spent about five minutes photographing her and then she quickly ran off to play with her friends. It was one of those cases, where all the elements of the picture came together in a magical way. 

Steve McCurry

McCurry shot the photo on Kodachrome 64 film using a Nikon FM2 and Nikon 105mm F2.5 AI-S lens.

In June 1985, the photograph appeared on the cover of the National Geographic magazine. It would later feature on the cover of the National Geographic 100 Best Pictures collector’s edition in 2001. It is also named “the most recognized photograph” in the entire history of National Geographic magazine.

I can understand why it moves people: she’s mysterious, ambiguous. She’s beautiful, yet she’s troubled. She’s persevering, there’s a fortitude in her. She’s poor, but she’s not timid. It’s a picture you can come back to time and time again.

Steve McCurry

Incidentally, the photo editor at National Geographic chose another image of Sharbat Gula in which she was covering her face to run as the cover for the magazine. Just before the magazine was to go to print, the magazine editor vetoed the photo editor’s choice and decided to run with the iconic photo we all know instead. 

The photograph would later represent to the world the plight and courage of the survivors of the Afghan War in the 1980s. 

The Afghan Girl Re-Visited

The image resonated so strongly that almost seventeen years later, in late 2001, with new turmoil in Afghanistan, the National Geographic Society and McCurry, launched an ambitious effort to find the long-lost girl who had become an icon in the West. 

In January, she was found living in poverty in the war-torn country, and McCurry photographed her again. This time he learned her name: Sharbat Gula. 

She was a striking little girl with an amazing look. I knew when I saw her it was going to be a powerful portrait. But her parents had been killed and life was difficult for her. When I began to search for her again I was told she had died in childbirth or been killed, but 17 years later we found her. It’s a very conservative place there, but we were happy we found her and [I was] relieved she was alive. I think she was happy she came to represent Afghanistan.

Steve McCurry

Steve McCurry’s Legacy

In his 40 year career as a photographer, Steve McCurry has traveled to the far corners of the earth to shoot conflicts, landscapes and cultures. But the one region that continues to occupy a special place in his heart is Asia. 

The thing that fascinates me about this region is that we’re all playing these different roles but we’re all part of the same human race. We’re the same, but we do things in different ways. We eat different foods, live in different houses, speak different languages.

Steve McCurry

Whatever the setting he happens to be shooting in, the emotional focus on his documentary photography invariably returns to the human factor. His affinity for photographing people has distinguished his work from others and has helped him earn countless awards.

McCurry has had several close calls – he was arrested in Pakistan, nearly drowned in a plane crash at sea in Slovenia, beaten up by a mob in India – and has been reported dead at least twice.

The part of my brain that’s concerned with self-preservation is very large. I always try to work within a margin of safety. You have to be alert and careful – and hope for the best.

Steve McCurry

Pirelli hired McCurry to lens the 40th edition of their famous calendar in 2013. The tyre company headed to Brazil and in a break from tradition, the models were shot with their clothes on in the heart of Rio de Janeiro. 

In 2015, McCurry was commissioned by Microsoft to take photographs in New Zealand, which were later used for their Windows 10 software.

Awards and Achievements

Aside from the Robert Capa Gold Medal in 1978, McCurry was awarded the Magazine Photographer of the Year award in 1984. 

He also holds the distinction of having won four first prizes at the World Press Photo Contest and the Olivier Rebbot Memorial Award twice.

In 2002, he was named Photographer of the Year by American Photo Magazine and the PMDA (Photo-imaging Manufacturers and Distributors Association). 

Steve McCurry founded ImagineAsia in 2004. The non-profit organization aims to work in partnership with community leaders and regional NGO’s to provide educational resources and opportunities to both children and young adults in Afghanistan. You can learn more about the project by visiting the ImagineAsia website.

McCurry received two Honorary Fellowships in 2006, one by the Royal Photography Society of Great Britain and the other by the New Zealand Institute of Professional Photography.

His work has been widely published internationally and McCurry frequently contributes to the National Geographic. In 1986, he became a member of the prestigious Magnum photos.

In 2019, Steve McCurry was finally inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame.

Style

• Reportage, documentary
• Capturing mood, human spirit
• Use of color to create atmosphere and sense of place
• Storytelling, narrative-driven
• Simplicity, chance
• Immersion into community, getting to know subjects

How to Shoot Like Steve McCurry

Steve McCurry’s long association with National Geographic has afforded him opportunities to take months-long assignments in locations all over the world. 

When on assignment, McCurry usually travels with locals who serve as assistants, guides and translators, he often wears native garb and tries to blend in with his surroundings. 

A lot of what I do is just wandering and observing. I might see someone on the street and feel there is some story written on his or her face.

Like most photographers, he researches a country beforehand and draws up a list of locations, but once on location he lets the journey dictate what to shoot instead. 

I always try to hit the ground running. I try to have a translator lined up as an assistant; this is the main thing. It’s always good to have someone who can speak the local language, and who can navigate where to go and help if there’s a problem. But as far as research goes, I don’t ever want to do too much of it because, if you go with too many preconceived notions, it can spoil things.

Steve McCurry – Interview with Amateur Photography Magazine

Preparation and Good Light

McCurry plans his shooting days around the light. He prefers to shoot in soft light and heads out in the morning or evening (magic hour) when the light is at its most flattering. 

During the day when the sun is shining and the light is harsh, he’ll head indoors and shoot temples, markets, shops, etc

I try and set up my shooting day to be in a place where there is favorable light the whole day. In the morning, I might be outside. In late morning, I might be inside, so I’m always in a place where the light is working with me.

Working on Assignments

McCurry doesn’t look for pretty landscapes to shoot but instead focuses on story and the people of the land he is covering. His greatest photos are never planned, instead, he relies heavily on chance and happy accidents to occur to get the perfect picture.

You can’t get hung up on what you think your “real” destination is. The journey is just as important.

McCurry used to spend up to six months on an assignment for National Geographic but today his photo assignments tend to be much more focused, and over shorter periods.

You don’t need to spend six months or a year photographing everything that moves. You’re shooting stories, not novels. It’s better journalism and it needs more thought. For instance, you wouldn’t go to Brazil with the idea of shooting the whole country. You’d take less time and do a region, or maybe Rio.

What is important to my work is the individual picture. I photograph stories on assignment, and of course, they have to be put together coherently. But what matters most is that each picture stands on its own, with its own place and feeling.

Steve McCurry

McCurry’s Photography Philosophy

McCurry believes there are no shortcuts in photography and producing consistently great photos comes from hard work and dedication to the craft.

The unfortunate thing in life is that there is a lot of work involved, and often it’s tedious work. Some people buy a camera and wait around to get assignments. It’s wonderful they’re that naive. It’s like telling me you’ve got a first-aid kit so now you’re a brain surgeon. You have to find your own way.

Even if you don’t feel like it, you still need to get your photos on the assignment. The more photos you take, the more chance you have of capturing that great image. 

Sometimes we’re productive and sometimes we’re not, but you really have to average it out. Some days are good, some days aren’t, and you just have to understand that and relax. It’s like playing roulette: eventually, 22 is going to come up. I mean, even Shakespeare probably had an editing process.

Steve McCurry

Don’t be afraid of failure and making mistakes, even great photographers like Steve McCurry take bad photos – the difference is he doesn’t show them to the rest of the world.

Yeah, not every picture is brilliant! A writer might write something that ends up just staying in the notebook, and for a photographer… you photograph some things that you know are just as a record or something that you know isn’t brilliant, but you get the wheels moving. Am I going to wait for the perfect picture before I start shooting? Well, how many perfect pictures are there in a lifetime? Get out and start examining the world, start probing, and eventually…

Not all your photos are going to be keepers, the only thing that matters is the end result. 

And in the end, you’re just judged on the work. People look at the work – a poem, photograph, sculpture, whatever – and they don’t think, ‘How many drafts went into this, was it edited, how long did it take, how many revisions?’ It’s just the work that matters – you put it on the table, and either it speaks to you or it doesn’t.

Steve McCurry

In his film days, McCurry would shoot on average 30 rolls of film in a day. That translates to 1,080 images per day or 30,000 images on a one-month assignment that need editing, scanning, archiving and retouching.

The Human Connection

McCurry crosses borders of language and culture, in search of interesting stories that make for great photography. 

I always have a connection with the subject, whether it’s in a refugee camp or in a suburb of Bombay. I always try and establish some sort of a personal relationship, however brief. There are also times when you may be walking down the street and you photograph people in a fraction of a second. Sometimes the image looks as though it was the product of a long interaction when in fact, it was very brief. 

Steve McCurry

One of the reasons McCurry’s work is so powerful is because it focuses on humanity and life, a subject that we can all relate to.

A perfect example of this is his post-September 11th coverage of Ground Zero. 

McCurry pays a touching tribute to the hundreds who lost their lives, and also the many heroic policemen and firemen who worked tirelessly to get New York back on track. 

It isn’t necessarily about capturing the story but instead capturing the stories of the people affected by the tragic event.

Capturing Portraits

When it comes to his street portraiture, McCurry takes very few candid photos. Working with an interpreter, his portraits are made with his subject’s permission and typically from a close distance. 

The one thing that all McCurry’s portraits have in common is the focal point is the eyes of his subjects. He always tries to incorporate catchlights into the eyes of his subject too – this helps lift his images and gives them a certain spark/or pop. 

This is achieved 99% of the time through his use of natural light (after many years of experience). 

He never uses strobes but does carry small portable LED lights, which he uses to accentuate certain things in some situations.

Related Article: 150+ Portrait Photography Quotes

McCurry tends to isolate his subjects by shooting between f/2.8 and f/5.6 – just enough so his subjects stand out from their surroundings.

McCurry’s portraits are simple, yet they possess a magical quality about them. I consider his portrait work more documentary than classic portraiture (think Yousuf Karsh and Richard Avedon). 

I think people, when you first encounter them, they try and put on a particular mask. I don’t want people to try and look a certain way. I want them to be completely natural and just themselves, without kinda grinning, or smiling, or putting on some kind of silly expression.

His best portraits portray his subjects in their environment and there is very little interaction between the photographer and the subject. The key is to have your subjects forget they’re being photographed and to be patient.

In a portrait, you want something of that person to reveal itself. Some portraits look too controlled. I like to see the naked personality; I want to see something that is real and something that is raw. You don’t see the hand of the photographer; you see the uniqueness of that person. 

Steve McCurry

Take McCurry’s most famous photo, The Afghan Girl. McCurry spent five minutes photographing the refugee camp before finally taking a few frames of the shy and curious girl with green eyes. 

The portrait was essentially a grab shot. The candid image was taken more like a documentary photo, rather than a straight portrait.

If you wait, people will forget your camera and the soul will drift up into view.

Steve McCurry

In the video below, Steve McCurry talks to Huxley studio about portraiture and his process:

Good Photography and Storytelling

McCurry is known for his vivid color imagery and use of Kodachrome film. His reasoning behind this is simple: we see the world in color, so it makes sense to shoot it in color.

Below he explains how to make a good color photo:

I think the way to identify a good color photograph is to ask yourself if you convert it to black and white does it still have interest? Does it still have value? That would make a good story idea: let’s look at a series of color photographs, let’s just break it down, see how they work: the light, the design, the graphic quality. If it’s a good picture, whether it’s been shot in color or in black and white, then it’s successful.

On what makes great documentary photography: 

I think good documentary photography, on its highest level, gets into a realm where you’ve tapped into some archetype of human connection. You’ve struck a chord in people that has tremendous meaning beyond the event itself.

On the importance of storytelling in photography:

It’s similar to when you hear a song on the radio. There are some songs you connect with and others you don’t. It’s the same with books and movies. Pictures that are memorable, that stick in the mind, are the best pictures. Sometimes I’m looking at pictures and there’s nothing going on; there’s no emotion.

For me, great pictures are about storytelling. I want to learn something from the picture or want it to evoke some kind of emotion. I want it to take me somewhere.

Steve McCurry

If you want to learn more about Steve McCurry’s working process and the stories behind his most famous images then I highly recommend purchasing his book Steve McCurry Untold: The Stories Behind the Images 

What Camera Does Steve McCurry Use?

Steve McCurry uses a Nikon D810, which he has called the best camera he has ever owned. 

I completed a major assignment a couple of weeks ago and used just a D810 and a 24-70mm lens forir the entire job. I use that lens for about 98% of my work now. When I’m walking on the street, I’ll take just one body and one lens. I’ll have a back-up body and lens back at the hotel, just in case. 

McCurry also likes to use a single prime lens when he’s wandering the streets. Another favorite lens of his is the cheap and lightweight Nikon AF 35-70mm F/2.8D.

McCurry was an early tester of the Leica SL2 and did a promotional video for Leica in 2019. 

[I have] virtually no interest in equipment – period. It’s not what motivates me. I don’t want to talk about gear. Any camera on sale today will give you wonderful results. It’s how you do what you do, and whether you enjoy your photography. Manufacturers want to sell their cameras, and their ads are the same now as they were 30 or 40 years ago. 

Steve McCurry

Other cameras he has used over the years include:

Digital: Nikon D810, Nikon D4, Nikon D3, Nikon D700, Nikon D2X
Film: Nikon FM2, Nikon N90S, Nikon F5, Nikon F4, Nikon F100, Olympus OM2N

My first camera was a Miranda. Then I switched to a Pentax and then an Olympus. When I went to India in 1975 with my girlfriend, she had a Nikon and some lenses. I thought we should just use the same camera system and share the lenses, so I switched to Nikon, and I’ve been using it ever since – different models, of course.

The Last Roll of Kodachrome

McCurry moved across to digital in 2003, but for over 20 years he used Kodachrome film. When Kodak announced that they would be discontinuing Kodachrome 64, McCurry wanted to pay homage to the film that he used to create his most iconic images.

Kodak agreed to provide him with the last roll of Kodachrome ever made. For the project, he wanted to photograph iconic people and places. He started off in New York and did a portrait of Robert de Niro. Then he went back to India where his journey began and photographed Bollywood film stars and village nomads.

To complete the project, he made one frame per subject, using his digital camera to check the exposure and composition, similar to using a polaroid camera. 

The film was processed in July 2010 at Dwyane’s Photo in Kansas. Many of the images were published on Vanity Fair’s website. These images are now exhibited in the museum at George Eastman House, in Rochester, New York.

Note: See the recommended videos below to watch the full documentary.

Other Steve McCurry Resources

Recommended Steve McCurry Books

Disclaimer: Photogpedia is an Amazon Associate and earns from qualifying purchases

• Steve McCurry: The Iconic Photographs, 2012
• The Stories Behind the Photographs, 2018
• Steve McCurry: A Life in Pictures, 2018

Steve McCurry Videos

The Last Roll of Kodachrome (2010)

In Search for the Afghan Girl (2002)

Behind the Scenes: Pirelli Calendar (2013)

For more Steve McCurry videos we recommend subscribing to his official YouTube channel.

Steve McCurry Photos

Looking for more Steve McCurry photos? Check out the image archive on Steve McCurry’s website.

Fact Check

With each Photographer profile post, we strive to be accurate and fair. If you see something that doesn’t look right, then contact us and we’ll update the post.

If there is anything else you would like to add about Steve McCurry’s work then send us an email: hello(at)photogpedia.com

Link to Photogpedia

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Sources

Official Steve McCurry Website, Biography
PDN Gallery, Q&A with Steve McCurry 
American Photo Jul-Aug 2006
Steve McCurry: The Iconic Photographs, 2012
Pirelli calendar turns over a new leaf, The Guardian, 2012
It’s All Mixed: An Interview with Steve McCurry, GUP Magazine, 2013
Iconic ‘Afghan Girl’ Portrait Was Almost Passed Over by Editor, Peta Pixel, 2013
The Steve McCurry Interview, The Sartorialist, 2013
Leica Stories, Leica SL2, November 2013
N Photo Mag, March 2014
Steve McCurry: The interview, Australian Photography, 2017

Steve McCurry: The Iconic Photographs, 2012
The Stories Behind the Photographs, 2018
A Life in Pictures, 2018

The Last Roll of Kodachrome, 2010
In Search for the Afghan Girl, 2010 
Magnum in Motion: Steve McCurry, 2011
Behind the Scenes of Pirelli Calendar, 2012
The Stories Behind the Photographs Promo Video, Phaidon, 2013
An Interview With Steve McCurry, TEDxAmsterdam, 2015
Steve McCurry on Portraiture, Huxley Gallery, 2020

The post Steve McCurry: The Journey Is Just as Important appeared first on Photogpedia.

His images capture the atmosphere and mood of a place rather than simply the details. He doesn’t photograph people but rather explores landscapes that have the memory of their presence and the traces of what’s left behind.

I often use the analogy of a theatre stage. I prefer to photograph the stage before the characters appear, and after they leave. At those times, there is a certain atmosphere of anticipation in the air. We can live in our imagination and our own stories on the empty stage, but as soon as the characters arrive, we begin to be caught up in their stories. It is a different experience.

Michael Kenna

Kenna’s approach is all about patience, and he visits the same locations many times over, waiting for the landscape to open up and reveal themselves to his lens.

He takes his time and gets to know the landscape first, then builds a connection, before finally photographing it the same way you would take a portrait of an old friend.

I am not interested in describing and copying what I see. I am interested in a collaboration with the subject matter.

Michael Kenna

His use of long exposures (sometimes up to 10 hours) helps create unique and atmospheric images, while also allowing for unpredictability and chance.

Perhaps most intriguing of all is that it is possible to photograph what is impossible for the human eye to see – cumulative time.

Michael Kenna

The aim of this article is to provide a brief overview of Michael Kenna’s work and photography style. If you find the article helpful, then we would be grateful if you could share it with other photographers.

Related: 52 Michael Kenna Quotes for Better Landscape Photography

Michael Kenna Biography

Name: Michael Kenna
Nationality: British
Genre: Landscape, Travel, Commercial, Nudes
Born: 1953 (Widnes, Lancashire, England)
Resides: San Francisco, California, USA (Since 1978)

Michael Kenna’s Style

• Minimalism and simplicity (influenced by Japanese haiku)
• Black and White
• Abstract, Long exposures
• Atmospheric, ethereal
• Meditative, reflective

What Camera Does Michael Kenna Use?

Kenna uses a Hasselblad medium format camera. His lenses range from 40mm to 250mm. He first used 35mm Nikkormats and Nikons for fifteen years before switching to the Hasselblad in 1986. For some projects, he uses a Holga camera and even a 4×5 large format camera.

I have a backpack and that determines how many cameras I carry. I insist that I can carry what I use to photograph as I don’t usually have an assistant. The backpack can hold two 120 camera bodies, two film backs, and two viewfinders. One is metered through the lens and the other one is a waist level.

I usually have five lenses with me ranging from 40mm to 250mm. All the equipment is Hasselblad. I also carry cable releases, a lightweight carbon fiber tripod, and sometimes a handheld light meter for the night. That’s about it.

Michael Kenna

He often uses a red filter to darken the skies and add more contrast to his images. For his long exposures, he adds an ND filter/s to get the desired effect.

What About Film

Kenna’s go to film is Kodak Tri-X 400. When he needs slower film to shoot during the day, he’ll switch to something like Agfa 25. He always uses black and white film for personal projects, and sometimes color for commercial.

I use black and white film. For the most part, I use Kodak Tri-X. 400asa film. One of the nice things about this film is that it hasn’t changed much since I first started 40 years ago. It’s like an old friend; It’s flexible and forgiving, and easy to work with. That’s why I still use it. I also use other films depending on which country I am in and where I can buy the films. Tri-X is my old stand by.

I find black and white to be more malleable and mysterious than color; it is more an interpretation of reality than a reflection of reality.

Michael Kenna

Processing Film

When it comes to processing film, Kenna always used the same formula regardless of light conditions and length of exposure:

I advise my students to develop their film about 10% less than whatever they normally do for daylight exposures. This is a good starting point. Serious night photographers may use any one of a dozen or so compensating developer methods to reduce the predictable contrast increase. Personally I’ve given up changing my developer times for different conditions. I now process everything 11 1/2 minutes, D76, 1:1, 68 degrees, and work out any adjustments at the printing stage. I’ve used this development process for as long as I can remember so I don’t even think about it anymore. Sometimes I’ve substituted Rodinal when D76 was not available but otherwise, I don’t experiment.

Michael Kenna

On a typical photoshoot, Kenna shoots between 15-20 rolls of film daily. Instead of processing all the film himself, he normally sends it out to a film lab and waits for the negatives to arrive in the post before printing his images (one of the most important stages of his process).

When photographing I probably average about 10-15 rolls of 120 film each day, which adds up after a few weeks. I have not processed my own film for many years and instead prefer to send them out to a reputable lab and keep my fingers crossed. I usually have two sets of contact prints made, one gets filed and the other I use to edit out images that look interesting. I cut out frames from the contact proofs and further edit before going into the darkroom to work on an enlarged print.

Darkroom and Printing

Kenna is a highly skilled printer (he began as a darkroom printer in the 70s). He uses Ilford Multigrade IV RC paper (neutral, glossy) and spends many hours in the darkroom dodging and burning to get his prints perfect.

Processing film is really one of the most boring parts of photography, but printing is another matter – a most important and often underrated part of the creative process. A good negative can be wrecked by a bad print – often is – a bad negative can rarely be redeemed, but there is so much potential for subjective interpretation and discovery in the middle. I can stay in the darkroom for many hours exploring a new negative.

I believe printmaking is a critical component of the photographic process and I will always try to do it myself. The negative is raw material, which a skilled and creative printmaker can mold in a thousand different ways. There are many technical and aesthetic decisions to be made along the way, the sum of which makes a print unique and very personal.

Michael Kenna

Print Size

He never prints larger than 8×10 because he likes the intimacy of a small print:

I prefer the intimacy of the smaller print. I experimented with 16×20 prints in the late 80s but later destroyed most of them. Some collectors really like them but they just didn’t feel right for me. Apart from the more obvious technical and optical considerations, what is more important for me is the relationship that a viewer has with the print.

The eye comfortably views and focuses an angle of about 30 degrees. This translates into a viewer comfortably standing about 10 inches away from a 4x5inch print and 3 1/2 feet away from a 16×20 inch print.

Small prints have a greater feeling of intimacy – one looks into the print. Large prints are more awesome – they are something a viewer looks out at. I believe in fitting the print size to one’s particular vision and prefer the more intimate engagement of the smaller image.

I highly recommend checking out the interview section on the Michael Kenna website for more darkroom and printing tips.

Related: Hiroshi Sugimoto: Capturing the Transience of Time

Other Resources

Recommended Michael Kenna Books

Disclaimer: Photogpedia is an Amazon Associate and earns from qualifying purchases.

• Michael Kenna: A 20 Year Retrospective, 2003
• Michael Kenna: Forms of Japan, 2015

Michael Kenna Videos

Michael Kenna: A Letter from Shinan, 2013

Hokkaido Documentary, 2006

Michael Kenna Photos

Looking for more Michael Kenna photos? Visit the image archive on the Michael Kenna website.

Fact Check

With each Photographer profile post, we strive to be accurate and fair. If you see something that doesn’t look right, then contact us and we’ll update the post.

If there is anything else you would like to add about Michael Kenna’s work then send us an email: hello(at)photogpedia.com

Link to Photogpedia

If you’ve enjoyed the article or you’ve found it useful then we would be grateful if you could link back to us or share online through twitter or any other social media channel. This article took 3 days to research and write. Sharing the link takes less than 2 minutes and doesn’t cost anything.

Finally, don’t forget to subscribe to our monthly newsletter, and follow us on Instagram and Twitter.

Sources

Michael Kenna: A 20 Year Retrospective, 2003

On the Shoulder of Giants, Camera Darkroom Magazine, July 1995
In the Darkroom with Michael Kenna, Photowork, 1997
Interview with Michael Kenna, Photoforum, 2003
Michael Kenna Interview, Photo Review, 2003
Pro Cameraman interviews Michael Kenna, Dolby Chadwick Gallery, July 2012
Curiosity is important, Light and Land, 2019
Official Michael Kenna website

Michael Kenna: A Letter from Shinan, 2013
Hokkaido Documentary, 2006

The post Michael Kenna: Light, Land and the Empty Stage appeared first on Photogpedia.