Makers or Takers

[cliveh]

Oscar Wilde died in 1900, so he probably wasn't refering to photography and Cartier-Bresson hadn't been born.

 

[MattKing]

Oscar Wilde died in 1900, so he probably wasn't refering to photography and Cartier-Bresson hadn't been born.

But their spirits - Wilde's and Winogrand's - seem to still be amongst us

 

[Don_ih]

Oscar Wilde died in 1900, so he probably wasn't refering to photography

Doesn't make that quote less true.

Cartier-Bresson

chose very carefully what to show the world. That wasn't reality: it was an interpretation of it.

 

[cliveh]

Doesn't make that quote less true.



chose very carefully what to show the world. That wasn't reality: it was an interpretation of it.

HCB images were a much closer version of reality than 99% of images taken today.

 

[BrianShaw]

HCB images were a much closer version of reality than 99% of images taken today.

Prove it. Put some substance in support of your statement.

 

[Don_ih]

HCB images were a much closer version of reality than 99% of images taken today.

That makes no sense whatsoever. Like Brian suggests, you can't possibly prove that.

Anyway, reality sucks. Photos don't smell like sewerage. They don't fire bullets at you. They don't drop dead in front of you. They don't burn your hands. They're not reality.

 

[MattKing]

Photos don't smell like sewerage. They don't fire bullets at you. They don't drop dead in front of you. They don't burn your hands. They're not reality.

And they are always something that someone makes to create an approximation - usually in two dimensions - of a reality that has three spatial dimensions and often a temporal one as well.

 

[BrianShaw]

Even “3-d photos” are 2-d approximations.

 

[awty]

Should only be in camera positives, anything on a negative is too many steps from reality.
Once more I don't trust pixels either, too much weird stuff going on there.

 

[jvo]

One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are. - minor white

 

[reddesert]

Although Cartier-Bresson fits into a certain kind of "realistic" photographic tradition, he chose to photograph in black-and-white, even centuries after color painting had become commonplace. If he had wanted to make closer representations of the reality we think we see, he could have taken up painting, but he did not.