Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/08/11
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Hi, > The other way to look at this is...how many of HCB's images really blow > you away...and how does that compare to the proportion of Salgado's > images that do the same thing.... Some of the best of HCB's photos operate on a long, slow fuse... The very first photograph which really 'blew me away' was by HCB. In the early 1970s, when I was about 12 or 13 years old, I saw in a newspaper the photograph by HCB of a family standing by a car in Soviet Georgia, with a church in the background. The people are looking out of the frame at something. The only photographers I'd ever heard of were David Bailey and Terence Donovan because of their pop status in the 1960s. I'd certainly never heard of Cartier-Bresson, but I remembered his name from the credit, and kept seeing photos by him everywhere, and they've eaten into my brain like little worms over the years. I think HCB and SS are too different really to be comparable, but I think HCB's photos have greater depth than Salgado's and are more general in what they say about the human condition. > I really am convinced that a large part > of why we celebrate HCB is his vision and explication of the 'decisive > moment,' The article I mentioned in my previous post discusses this. HCB didn't choose the phrase 'decisive moment'. The French edition of the book is called "Images a la Sauvette", which has a meaning more related to 'on the run', like a pick-pocket or a bag-snatcher. Although HCB did quote Cardinal Retz (I think) who said "there is nothing which doesn't have its decisive moment" the book title was chosen by his US publisher. It's impossible to know if the phrase would have stuck if it had just remained a quotation in the book. However, the article's author suggests that it gave HCB another label to hide behind, from which he could do his thing unobserved; rather like his label 'photojournalist'. > Wait...What it means is that in 50 years...if anyone but three scholars > is talking about or paying any attention to what we now call > photography, I'd be willing to be that Salgado's work and 'myth' will be > greater than HCBs. I think you're wrong, but the only way to find out for sure is to be here in 50 years time. I'll be almost as old then as HCB is now. I think HCB's stature will grow and I think he will be recognised as being as important as Picasso, Mozart and Shakespeare. - --- Bob mailto:bob@web-options.com