The thing people so often overlook about a photographer like HCB when using him to make a case for an older style of photography is that he was anything but an equipment traditionalist.
The small handheld 35mm cameras that he used were the most modern of then-available photographic technologies, and the idea of going into the world to photograph the way he did seemed radical.
It seems weird to me that some (though not all) in the contemporary street photography world insist on conservatively sticking to old ways of seeing and old ways of photographing rather than embracing the HCD radicalism.
h00ligan wrote:
I’ve found the quote in decisive moment, that I was recalling.
“I hope we will never see the day when photo shops sell little schema grills to clamp onto our viewfinder; and that the golden rule will never be found etched into our ground glass”
“ 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 feebly composed can be saved by reconstruction of its composition under the dark rooms enlarger ; the integrity of vision is no longer there. “
I don’t think he’d be a fan of 10fps and 60 mp to crop into one moment where something happens in the corner of a frame, but who knows. Maybe!
gdanmitchell wrote: h00ligan wrote:
It’s been a long time since I read the commentary but I seem to recall HCB holding extremely strong opinions about intention before shutter release. Most of the modern “must haves” are built for burst shooting and heavy cropping. Significant use of the latter he eschewed as a failure iirc. I could be wrong.
Yes and no. He believed that, in contrast to the then-traditional practice of pretty cumbersome photography, that using small 35mm handheld cameras allowed him to instantly record situations that were fleeting. There often is little or no time to ponder one’s intent in this kind of photography — it is frequently quick and intuitive.
BTW, he also eventually decided (or so he claimed) that he was less that enamored with the whole photography thing… ;-)
May 07, 2025 at 06:50 AM
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