Retro. From an essay on Paris teenagers. I spent several weeks with one group of about 8 Paris high school students for a special edition on France for NatGeoMagazine. I became a part of their lives and they in mine , just as I do on most projects my whole photo life. If you are serious about photography you will eventually want to put your work in context. If the work is curated and positioned, it will live on in books and exhibitions etc. This single frame is the one photo from this summer long essay that has taken this positioning. What I liked about it mostly was that it was taken on the Seine about 200 yards from the front door of Henri Cartier-Bresson who I’ve admired since childhood. He would have hated the picture of course. He hated color. Yet we must be influenced then we must walk away. At the very same time I’ve always struggled with color myself and always shoot color as if it were b&w. Pretend this is b&w. It should still work. #paris #teenagers
I’ve always liked and admired this photo. It’s both meaningful and technically excellent in both lighting and classical composition. I’ve learned a lot from what David has written here over the years, but have probably leaned just as much from studying these kinds of photos. Studying the work at least taught me what I needed to learn.
People always pooh pooh the rules of composition, which should really be called something more like “guidelines for effective compostion,” but I find that far more often than not when I overlay a great photo with grids such as rule of thirds or harmonic triangles or golden ratios, that it fits into at least one of the classic patterns.
Interestingly, and unsurprisingly, many of the great photos have some element in them that doesn’t conform to a guideline, like the sight lines being all over the place in this example, but when done right, as is the case here, the deviation from the guidline can add depth and complexity.
Still, as in just about any endeavor, I think it best to master the rules before starting to deviate too much from them.
BTW, does anyone have the link to that story that used to come up a lot that showed examples of great photos breaking the rules? I’ve wanted to use that in my classes and have wasted an inordinate amount of time looking for it.
On a related topic that David has written about recently, while looking for the aforementioned article, I came across this piece (links are hard to see here on burn, but it’s there if you click) that goes into great detail about Robert Frank’s “The Americans,” much of which concerns how he broke certain practices that were considered rules at the time. But what caught my attention, and I found most relevant to the ongoing conversation was the part about how he prepared, especially in the context of the story he was trying to tell.
He gathered maps and itineraries, collected letters of reference in-case people questioned his photographing intentions, he sent introductions to people and companies around the country and he sought out suggestions from fellow photographers about places to photograph.
But most importantly, I think, he came up with a list of symbols that he wanted to capture, such as flags, cowboys, rich societies, jukeboxes and politicians, as well as others that are plainly discernible in the book.
So he didn’t just drive around America and shoot whatever came before him. He had a story to tell and very consciously went out and found the photographs that told it. Without that, I doubt very much anyone would have ever heard of “The Americans.”
And of course you see that kind of forethought and preparation in the work of most of the great photographers. I’d bet there was quite a bit of that going on in the photo above.