Henri Cartier-Bresson and Le Moment Décisif

Anyone who has the remotest interest in the history of photography has heard of Henri Cartier-Bresson.  Legendary French photographer, co-founder of Magnum Photo and the man who coined The Decisive Moment, Cartier-Bresson’s images from the early 20th Century are well known.  He was known for shooting 35mm cameras with 50mm lenses and using high speed film for capturing fleeting moments in on film.  Although he was highly skilled with a camera, his most iconic photographs didn’t rely on rich tonal range or sharpness to carry the subject; often the image has an almost lo-fi feel to it.

It is, of course his idea of The Decisive Moment that interests most photographers and has been taught and copied for the past 80 years.  But, what exactly is it?  Simply put, the decisive moment is a fleeting moment in time where the relationship between the subjects, background and with the photographer coalesce in a way that establishes the photograph.  Each element in image must have balance in terms of composition and while the ‘rules’ don’t need to be followed rigidly, the image should have visual tension between subjects.  Such a photograph requires a great deal of skill in observing the scene, being instinctive with the camera and pressing the button at precisely the right moment.

The iconic example of Cartier-Bresson’s viewpoint, “Behind the Gare Saint-Lazaire”, shows the decisive moment in action.

Cartier-Bresson was shooting a rangefinder Leica at the time, which requires the photographer to look through a viewfinder that is offset from the axis of the lens.  Cameras of this type are a little more tricky to compose and focus (I have two of them and the experience is quite different from using an SLR), so when Cartier-Bresson was composing this shot, it is difficult to know what he was trying to shoot.  By his admission in the documentary interview [2], he poked the lens through the railings to get a view of the train yard and didn’t see the figure leaping the large puddle in the foreground.  Perhaps the image he had in mind was more about the reflections of the buildings in the water and the debris that is partially submerged.  The photograph comes alive because of the leaping man.  He is about to hit the water despite having left the relative dryness of the timber and Cartier-Bresson has captured both the moment and the motion of the action.

Cartier-Bresson’s admission that the picture was an accident means that luck and lack of intent are equally as valid as careful planning and execution of a photograph.  I’m reminded of the image ‘Hyères, France 1932’ [1], where a man cycles through the composition.  In this photograph, Cartier-Bresson composed the shot and waited for a subject to enter the frame at the right time and position to make the image work.  The planning ensured that the leading lines of the staircase and its railings were as he wanted and when the cyclist appeared in the top left of the frame, the photograph could be made.

Really Looking

These examples of his work definitely achieve ‘le moment décisif’ but with different approaches.  What they do have in common, though is the skill of really looking at what is going on.    In the interview ‘L’amour de court'[2], Cartier-Bresson asserts that the decisive moment cannot be willed into being, that a photographer cannot force the photograph, but must instead look intensely at the emerging action in the scene.  The skill of looking is closely coupled with the need to be ready to shoot, which means that being skilled in using the camera is also an important element to this style of photography.  What is interesting about Cartier-Bresson’s practice of looking is that it completely consumed him while he was working as a photographer.  When he took up drawing and painting in later life, he saw it as a way of returning to normality.  I concluded that this is because a decisive moment doesn’t really exist in that genre of art; the painter can create them at will and take as long as they like in doing so.  Cartier-Bresson was looking for peace when he transitioned to drawing.

The Impact and Legacy of The Decisive Moment

Like all innovators, Cartier-Bresson’s concept has been interpreted and re-interpreted over the many years since he first postulated it.  For many years, the idea of the decisive moment was used to describe real life in documentary terms.  The normality of routine in the case of street photography and the hell of war as shot by the famous correspondents of the time.  It has resulted in many derivative art works too, which while flattering to history have led to it being considered to be cliched.  A parallel example for me occurred a few years ago in London.  I was attending a photographic course where an interesting technique was introduced for night photography called ‘zoom burst’.  The idea was that with the camera mounted securely on a tripod with a zoom lens fitted, a long exposure would be taken, during which the lens was extended slowly over its range of focal lengths.   The resulting image would have a ‘hyperspace’ feel to it and was particularly effective if the subject was recognisable to begin with.  An example of one of my zoom burst photographs of the recognisable Tower Bridge can be seen below. The tutor for the course said that once his students had discovered this technique, they would latch onto it for the rest of the session, describing it as the ‘crack cocaine of the night shoot’.

The Decisive Moment has suffered the same kind of issue.  Capturing a perfectly balanced slice of time and declaring it to be a moment in life is now considered somewhat narrow.   As Liz Wells’ article suggests, these tiny fragments do not really tell as story or give an insight into some bigger meaning by themselves.  So, in the case of documentary photography, the viewer insinuates the bigger picture, largely owing to their knowledge or experiences.  In the case of the famous war photographers, the sentiment that war is hell is re-enforced not informed by the images themselves.

The further criticism that the decisive moment does not lead the viewer to some conclusion or photographic climax, but simply captures a potentially contextless moment in time was demonstrated by Paul Graham in his book The Present[3] Here, the photographer captures two or three moments, one immediately after the other using a similar composition.  Between shots, he makes small adjustments to position, viewpoint and point of focus to create what at first glance, look like the same frame duplicated. However, the effect of doing this is to show the real dynamic of the subjects in the frame.  In some cases, their gestures and interactions with each other have changed in a variety of ways and in some, they have left the frame altogether.   An example of this can be seen below.

In these photographs, the recognisable elements such as the crossing, buildings etc. are still there, but the framing is subtly different and the fast pace of time means that none of the vehicles remain in the picture from one to the other.  What stands out when looking carefully is the presence of more pedestrians and the clear change to the background with the obscuring of the Empire State Building by the truck.  What Graham was doing here was to achieve the opposite of Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment; to show the significance of more than one moment in revealing the ‘flux of life’ [4].  However, the result is less ‘spot the difference’ and more a lingering visual tension to reveal what is in front of us.

A more extreme approach to the antithesis of the decisive moment is the work of Aïm Deüelle Lüski [5][6], a photographer who wanted to re-examine the roles of the photographer and the camera in capturing real life. Lüski rallied against the simple capturing of a moment in front of the camera being directed by the photographer’s eye.  His idea was to remove the influence of the photographer altogether, placing the camera within the scene rather than simply observing.   As part of his work, Lüski built his own multi-aperture cameras, often with formal and random fields-of-view to create images that capture what is within and outside of the viewer’s perspective.  The resulting photographs have an aesthetic feel that maintain a level of ‘realism’; an example of which can be seen below.

Lüski’s NSEW camera shown above is essentially a box with pinhole apertures in each side panel.  The apertures are arranged in the four compass bearings that give it its name and the negative mounted internally alone the diagonal.  Light enters from each pinhole and exposes the emulsion face and through the film sheet, creating a blend of each viewpoint in a single image.  What Lüski was trying to do was to let the camera participate in the scene and capture an image that describes life at that moment.  The single slice of time is obviously common to both Lüski’s work and the concept of a single decisive moment, but he, like Paul Graham expressed life through more than one view of that moment.   It can clearly be seen, though that Lüski’s work is not of a documentary style, but of an aesthetic quality.   Breaking the hegemonic or dominant trend in photography shows us how there are many different ways of capturing what is presented to us in life.  I find both Graham’s and Lüski’s work fascinating and challenging because they break the conventions.

Of the viewpoints on the decisive moment raised in the course notes, Zouhair Ghazzal’s is of most interest to me [7].  Far from taking a stance that dismisses the concept like Graham and Lüski, Ghazzal points to the significance of the way a photograph is composed and what is both said and unsaid by the image.

In other words, the decisive moment works best when the sudden cut in time and space that the photograph operates through the release of the shutter is meaningful, as it narrates to us in a single frame the before and after; while other photographs of the decisive type remain anecdotal, with no precise meaning, or with no meaning at all, relying instead on the juxtaposition of bodily gestures with symmetries created by light and space. Hence that sudden urge, when confronted with a Cartier-Bresson image, to narrate it—even though the photographer himself would feel indifferent to such a task. An image does not narrate: it rather creates an unbridgeable abyss between itself-as-frame and the rest of the unframed world—comparable to Sartre’s “existential hole,” which is only conscious of the absurdity of its own existence, or, more commonly, to a one-night-stand, as something that is given, but with no connection to anything else—in time and space, which pushes a hapless and confused imagination for a narrative – Zouhair Ghazzal – The indecisiveness of the decisive moment [7].

This quotation resonated with me as in looking for the decisive moment in photographs as part of this study.  I recently read a very caustic comment on Joel Meyerowitz’ Instagram page in response to a picture he had shared from a recent trip to London.  The image was a street scene with a number of people going about their business, not interacting with each other in any apparent way.  The person making the comment could see no merit in the photograph, claiming that Meyerowitz could effectively get away with anything by being a famous photographer.  My reaction to the photograph was the opposite.  I looked carefully at what was going on with the people in the photograph and found myself narrating the story that was unfolding before me.  The people were all avoiding colliding with each other and the one static element, a lamppost in the centre of the composition.  They were doing this instinctively, without looking around them as many do in modern society with the advent of the smartphone.  While I am certain that the photographer had seen this playing out before him, my imaginative narrative is my own and overlooks the actual moment that has been captured in search of its context in time and space.   What I am also certain of, is that my ability to really look at what is going on around me would have most likely missed this moment.

In Ghazzal’s appraisal that the contemporary urban landscape is too monotonous and dull for the decisive moment, I find that I completely disagree.  I believe the urban environment to have continuously evolved both as a result of its inhabitants and in conjunction with shaping the fashions and attitudes of them too.  The same observation could have been made during the early days of street photography, by Cartier-Bresson or by those who followed such as Evans, Winnogrand and Meyerowitz.   I am reminded of a recent conversation with a colleague who had returned from a diving holiday in Israel.  During her visit, she stayed in a hotel called ‘The Walled Off Hotel’, in Bethlehem, built by the graffiti artist Banksy.  Its amusing play on words from the famous Waldorf Hotel is contrasted with it’s location next to the huge security wall separating Israel from Palestine.  Her review of the hotel was interesting enough but it was her assessment of how things had changed in the region with the introduction of the wall and the people’s reaction to it that fascinated me.  Such a hotel would not have been possible when the wall was originally built, so how had the environment and the populous adapted over time?   Such changes, no matter how significant or obscure are rich in decisive moments.

Conclusion

I’m led to believe that many students on this course struggle with The Decisive Moment and its importance and relevance to photography today.  I am no exception.  For me, Cartier-Bresson was saying that the decisive moment was a harmonisation of the elements in the composition and their relationship to each other.  On the other hand, he said that luck was a factor, in particular with his famous work examine earlier.  So, if luck can determine the outcome, we should just snap everything on the off chance?  Moving away from that way of working was, for me the motivation for learning and improving in photography, so that cannot be the case.  What I believe he was saying was the we need to really look at what is in front of us.  If we see something that we determine is a moment we want to capture, luck in the composition can help make the picture, but it cannot be the only aspect.  Cartier-Bresson’s Behind the Gare Saint Lazaire would have been a good composition without the man leaping, but it’s the lucky element that brings out the moment that will never be repeated.  Listening to Cartier-Bresson talk about looking in the video [2], what interested me was the idea that looking is a state of mind that photographers need to enter; in his case something that he recognised once he stopped doing it.  My issue with street photography is that I lack the confidence to photograph people at fairly close range (my camera of choice is not unlike Cartier-Bresson’s; a Leica M with 50mm lens) for fear of intrusion or reaction.  However, my biggest issue is actually more that I try hard to make a photograph happen, consequently missing the moment when something does actually happen.  Cartier-Bresson made it clear in his interview that the photographer can only observe and capture, not force the image to come to life.   In a video interview with Joel Meyerowitz [8], he discusses what we choose to include in the frame and what we choose to leave out.  Rather than just a comment on composition, Meyerowitz states that it is important not to overlook the things that are continuing to unfold outside of our frame.  To that end, the decisive moment for me is not simply what is happening in front of the lens, but the photographer’s decision to include it in a single moment, committed to a photograph.  That decision to press the button is as much decisive as the moment itself.

The reaction and treatment of the decisive moment in the context of modern photography is interesting.  Of the photographers and commentators researched as part of this project, I tend to agree with Ghazzal’s supposition that there doesn’t necessarily have to be a decisive moment that reveals what is going on in the frame.  The observation of the subject is vital to the success of the image.  The viewer draws their own conclusion about what’s there and what it might mean, which for me is the enduring appeal of capturing a fleeting moment that will never be seen again.

Reviewing some of my own work, I found a good example of a decisive moment that I would probably not previously have considered as such.  I was shooting at a long distance triathlon event that my wife was competing in a couple of years ago.  Among the competitors were a number of friends of ours, one of which had been through a serious illness the year before.  She entered the race to prove to herself that she had recovered from treatment and could once again take part in the sport that she was keen on before she became ill.   I was standing at the finish line when she came into view.  One of our friends said to me “this is gonna be emotional, Rich” as she crossed the line to be met by her husband who had finished earlier.  I shot this photograph of them at the moment they embraced and although the scene evolved over several seconds, this was the point at which all that emotion was revealed in both of them.   Luck played its part with the heads-up I’d been given, but the reaction to this photograph from all who have seen it has been greater than any other image I’ve shot in recent years.

 

References

[1] Tate Britain Exhibition Catalogue, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/cartier-bresson-hyeres-france-p13112 (accessed March 2019)

[2] L’amour de Court,  2001, https://vimeo.com/106009378 (accessed March 2019)

[3] Pantall, Colin, 2012 – The Present, https://www.photoeye.com/magazine/reviews/2012/05_17_The_Present.cfm?

[4] Jobey, Liz, 2012 – Paul Graham: ‘The Present’ https://www.ft.com/content/f97e3a3a-5206-11e1-a30c-00144feabdc0 (accessed March 2019)

[5] Van Gilder, Hilda, 2012, ‘Still Searching:  Photography and Humanity’, https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/26928_photography_and_humanity (accessed March 2019)

[6] Azoulay, Ariella, 2014, ‘Aïm Deüelle Lüski: Horizontal Photography’, http://moby.org.il/en/exhibition/aim-deuelle-luski/ (accessed March 2019)

[7] Ghazzal, Zouhair, 2004, ‘The Indecisiveness of The Decisive Moment”, http://zouhairghazzal.com/photos/aleppo/cartier-bresson (accessed March 2019)

[8] Phaidon, 2012, “Joel Meyerowitz – What You Put in the Frame Determines the Photograph”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xumo7_JUeMo (accessed March 2019)

 

 

Introduction – what we know so far

With the completion of The Frozen Moment, it’s clear that photography gives us the ability to reveal what the human eye is not able to isolate or retain.  The work of Muybridge, Worthington and Edgerton further reveals the beauty in nature that is happening all around us but is largely invisible.  During our recent video conference, Rob Bloomfield challenged us to look for the key elements in the first of the assessment criteria for this course in Edgerton’s Milk Drop Coronet, 1957 (below).

The criterion in question was as follows:

1. Demonstration of Technical and Visual Skills, which breaks down into
   • Materials – this could cover any element brought into making the photograph, such as light, equipment, props etc.
   • Techniques – what was used to make the image?
   • Observational skills – seeing the elements that make up the photograph as it evolves
   • Awareness – similar to observational skills, but more being aware of the context, the moments leading up to the decision to make the photograph
   • Design and compositional skills – how the photograph was executed.

When we were discussing this, my initial thought was that one would be unlikely to look at every image with these criteria in mind as thusfar, I’ve been considering the impact an image has on me personally and how that might work creatively.  However, I’ve come to realise that this gives our consideration of a photograph a simple structure to challenge the way we might think about the image.  Practicing using these simple titles may help understand the quality of a photograph.

With regard to Milk Drop Coronet, the obvious materials include milk, strobes and dye, but the technique was the ground-breaking use of strobes combined with the fastest shutter cameras available.  When we consider awareness and observation, it is here that the creative connection is made.  Edgerton was an engineer who began photographing the everyday.  His knowledge that the surface tension of the milk; the effect of the connection of the molecules at the boundary between the milk and air above it, would be disturbed by the falling droplet.  What he wanted to observe was how the energy from the drop dispersed as it impacted the surface.  What he revealed was the beauty of this natural physics in action.   His compositional skill with this image is in the cleanness of the the background and placing of the next falling drop above the coronet.   It is a stunning image, both technically and aesthetically.

For the Durational Space

In this Project, we see photography used to reveal time instead of stopping it.  Although my early photographs as a child exhibited motion blur for all the wrong reasons, the concept of using long exposure to capture the passing of time through a moving subject is something I am more than familiar with.

Capa’s photographs from Omaha beach are, as we know a combination of a number of elements that occurred deliberately and accidentally [1].  Capa set out to show the hell that is war by observing the emotion in a situation rather than trying to be a part of it.

“You cannot photograph war, because it is largely an emotion. He [Capa] did photograph that emotion by shooting beside it. He could show the horror of a whole people in the face of a child” – John Steinbeck

Capa’s creative vision in being an observer to war’s emotion is complimented in the Omaha beach photographs by other factors.  The film was botched during development which vastly reduced the number of usable negatives from the roll as well as increasing the drama of each through larger grain and blurring.  The solider in the image that has come to be called ‘The Face in the Surf” was later identified and tracked down.  Almost immediately after the photograph was taken, the soldier was injured and Capa found himself helping him onto the beach so that he could be treated.  In a way, Face in the Surf was a slice of time captured when the soldier was advancing on the enemy with the steely, committed expression on his face.  That slice of time, however was longer than the works examined in Project 1, starting with Capa’s observational awareness and ending with the soldier being shot.

For me, the use of movement in an image describes something that can only be appreciated during more than a passing glance.  What is clear in Capa’s famous image is that the blurred subjects in the foreground and background make one linger on the image long enough to observe the hell of war that Capa was witnessing.

With Hiroshi Sugimoto’s work Theatres, photographer uses time to completely remove traces of activity from the images.  Opening the shutter when the film starts and leaving until the final credits, the screen is completely blank; all traces of the movie failing to register on the photographic film.  In Sugimoto sought to use the static subjects in the image to frame the void of empty space, which reveals the beauty of the old theatre buildings themselves.   The effect of the movie providing slow, soft light and the absence of any people in the image leads the eye around the detail of Sugimoto’s framed emptiness.

In the documentary film Contacts, Sugimoto states that his approach to photography is built on deciding on the vision before deciding how to shoot it.  For example, his architectural series intends to show the conceptual shape of the buildings rather than the photograph being a source of precise detail.  To remove that distraction, Sugimoto deliberately made every image out of focus.  While it’s alien to thing that an out of focus image can be appealing, each photograph convey’s the vision perfectly.  The longer we look at one of these images, the more acclimatised we become to the absence of sharpness and are left with a pleasing view.  The shot below shows the twin towers of the World Trade Center dominating the skyline around them.  When we think of the scale of those buildings, this is exactly what the visualisation of the architecture is as opposed to the detail of the buildings themselves.

Michael Wesley took long exposure to greater extremes by capturing the passage of many months of time in a single frame.   For his series of images of the rebuilding of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Wesley set cameras around the perimeter of the museum site and opened the shutter for nearly 3 years [].  During this huge duration, the camera captures the slow progression of the reconstruction works gradually layering up on the film as well as the tracks of the sun and moon across the sky as each day passes.  There resulting image is complex, hard to navigate but clearly shows the evolving of the work and the photograph as an observation.

For me though, his more interesting work is far less grand.  His shot of a vase of flowers dying slowly over time from the series Still Lives, shows the power of this technique [].  Here, the viewer can clearly see the flowers in their prime gradually moving downwards as they decay and drop petals on the table.  This image evokes a sadness related to the loss of the flowers but also how time can be compressed into a single, seemingly fleeting frame that is itself only looked at briefly.

My Own Work on Durational Space

As I stated previously, I am no stranger to the use of long exposure or the addition of accidental technique to achieve motion or drama in an image.  However, unlike Sugimoto, I’ve not previously envisioned the subject and then decided how to shoot it to achieve the aesthetic that I want.  Perhaps the most common of subjects for me have been photographing triathlon events and waterfalls, both needing movement to be revealed in order to make them interesting.  I have included two examples here.

The first is a shot I took at a race in 2016.  My friend is about to pass a cyclist much to his surprise and probably frustration.  I’d been practicing panning the camera with a slow shutter speed to include the movement in cycling as without that, the result can be very static.  The sense of speed of both sets of wheels in this shot is emphasised by the indecipherable writing on the rims of the red bike.  Her expression of pure focus on the job in hand is offset by the guy looking back at her which suggests that he is unsettled.  The background and foreground detail is largely lost, even though the spectators can be seen clearly enough.

The second photograph is one that I shot with a pinhole camera, which I’d not used before.  I was at shooting West Burton Falls in North Yorkshire with my DSLR and the technique was all about capturing the movement of the water over the falls themselves.  When it came to this camera, the extremely small aperture of f132 and no control other than choice of film ISO and shutter ‘speed’, a long exposure with this camera would be all I could really achieve.  What I failed to appreciate was that film has a non-linearity of sensitivity decay called Reciprocity Failure.  This is the way that the film gradually loses its light sensitivity over the duration that it is exposed, which is not a problem at typical speeds such as 1/30th.  In fact, when the exposure slows to over 1s the reciprocity failure value for that film stock means an even longer exposure to get the same amount on the film, e.g. 1s might instead be 2 or even 4 seconds to get the same equivalent exposure.  I had not taken this into account with my 15 second exposure in this photograph.  The resulting happy accident was an underexposed shot of the whole distance to the falls from my position, which in reality was only about 50m away.  Pinhole cameras tend to have substantial light roll-off from all but the centre region of the image so what shouldn’t have worked at all, ended up being a softly lit, glass-like waterfall with almost no sharp details to distract from it.

In concluding the study for this Project, I recently visited London for a short break.  On the overland train back to our hotel, I noticed the way that perspective of the lit skyline changed as the train moved past.  In a similar way to Maarten Vanvolsem [4], I turned to my smartphone that has an app that creates a pseudo slow shutter speed.  It achieves long speeds by taking multiple shorter speed shots of say 1/2 second and overlays them.  For the two images below I pressed the phone to the train window to reduce internal reflections from the glass and shot the skyline with exposures of 3 to 5 seconds.

 

The first shot of the Brixton skyline on the way into the station shows the effect of layering, which for some reason the phone did not stitch the three images together properly.  The second shows the skyline crossing the river, with the motion of the train, its motion and the window glass distorting the cranes on the horizon.

In conclusion, the durational space takes us away from the stationary.  The viewer looks at the image for more than simple sharpness and lack of blur or noise and instead embraces the feeling of time passing.  This passage of time is much like the ‘moment’ that we achieve with fast shutter speeds, but instead of revealing what we don’t see, it reveals what we might not have noticed.  In the case of Capa, it emphasises the emotion and terror or the war. In Sugimoto’s work, we are directly to consider the unnoticed and the idea behind the subject and its place in the composition.  I mean, when was the last time we noticed the interior of a cinema during a showing of a film?  Wesley’s work draws our attention to progression over time, from the simple act of a plant dying to the major renovation of a museum building.  Finally, the brain’s ability to see the movement in a still image means too that the way the photograph was shot could also be abstract as with Vanvolsem’s Contraction of Movement image [4].

References

[1]. Wiess, H, 2018, Visual Culture article, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-photographer-robert-capa-risked-capture-d-day-images-lost, accessed February 2019

[2] Sugimoto, M, https://www.sugimotohiroshi.com, accessed February 2019

[3] Gramovich, M, 2015, Time Shows, Ultra-long exposures in the work of Michael Wesley, https://birdinflight.com/inspiration/experience/time-shows-ultra-long-exposure-in-works-of-michael-wesely.html, accessed February 2019

[4] OCA, 2018, Photography 1 – Expressing your Vision Course Notes

 

The Brief

Start by doing some of your own research into the photographers discussed.  Then, using fast shutter speeds, try to isolate a frozen moment of time in a moving subject.  Depending on the available light you may have to select a high ISO to avoid visible blur in the photograph.  Add a selection of shots, together with relevant shooting data and a description of process (how you captured the images), to your learning log.

Preparation

For this exercise, I wanted to shoot something that reminded me of the research in the Project ‘The Frozen Moment”.  The pioneers who used photography to investigate the physics of the natural world interested me because of my engineering past.  The almost accidental beauty of the images they produced offer both that instant slice of time, but also a close and personal view of phenomena that had previously been postulated rather than observed.  For my Freeze shot, I wanted to do something similar.

My idea

To capture the falling grains of sand in an hourglass and suspend them in time.  This idea came to me when thinking about the time element to the work in the project.  Hourglasses are a classical tool for measuring time, dating back to 350 BC in ancient Rome and are still used today for fairly mundane tasks such as boiling an egg for the correct duration.  The grains inside an hourglass fall in a column under the influence of gravity and move rapidly, so to freeze their motion with a fast shutter speed would be a good example of what Szarkowski was talking about [1].

The setup

My first plan was to shoot the hourglass closeup with a continuous LED light source and fast shutter speed.  I selected my 200mm f/4 macro lens which is capable of focusing down to 50cm and a Manfrotto LED.  This lamp provides an even beam of light at 3 different power levels and I’ve used it many times to illuminate small areas.  My abstract images in Exercise 1.3 used this light, with different gels applied.   The layout is shown below.

 

Pretty early on, I realised that there was insufficient light to allow for a high shutter speed (> 1/2000th of second was what I was aiming for).  Increasing the ISO obviously started to degrade the image quality and although the Nikon D4 is capable of ISO 204,800 through clever use of it’s electronics, I wanted the images to be usable.  So, I turned to the work of AM Worthington, who started using electrical sparks as lighting sources; an idea taken forward by Harold Edgerton.  Both men saw that if you strobed the light source, the shutter could be a lot slower, something which they had no real choice of doing in the early days of automatic shutter design.   The durations of some of their flashes were as short as 1/1,000,000th second.   As long as the flash edge is short, any motion in the subject is frozen, a technique used today by fashion photographers in the studio.

I have used flash sources previously so decided to start with my speedlight flashgun.   I connected the flash to the camera via a cable so that it could positioned relative to the subject instead of mounted in the hot shoe.  With flash sources, the common misconception is that the higher the power, the more intense the light.  In actual fact, the unit simply extends the duration of the flash to get the intense light coverage.  For this shot, I wanted to have the shortest possible flash time, so I set the power to its minimum; 1/128th of its range.

I had purchased an hourglass with black sand grains, which against a white background would give a good level of contrast.  For the background, I used a piece of semi-gloss photo paper.

The Photograph

Reflection

My early attempts with the flash were much better technically than those taken with the LED light source, mainly due to getting a good amount of light on the grains of sand to give contrast to the background.   At ISO1600, the noise performance of the D4 is not perceptively degrading the image quality.  This left the composition itself.  My original intention was to freeze he falling grains as they exit the upper part of the hourglass, effectively creating a column in the lower section.  After several attempts to capture the brief moment when that occurs, I had a frame that didn’t really work.  The composition above has balance in the upper and lower sections of the hourglass in each corner of the square-cropped frame.   I am happy with the simplicity of the composition and the choice of converting to Black & White to remove any colour present in the light fringing within the glass.  There was enough light to pick out the grains of sand and a short enough pulse to freeze the movement.  What puzzled me for a while was how some of the grains are very sharp and some are not, depending on their position in the ‘column’.   Even with a shallow depth of focus, they are more apparently random than I had expected.  I then realised, that I was viewing them through a curved glass whose imperfections are most likely to be the cause.  The effect of mixing sharpness with softness really works for me, though.  From a compositional perspective, it is the presence of the grains in the top section that have yet to fall that makes the hourglass stand out.  While the image I was trying to shoot was ‘clever’, it didn’t work as a photograph for me.  I’ve included the rejected image below.

The Rejected Image

Initial Thoughts and Research

Anyone of middle age can remember their early encounters with photography in the film age.  Most cameras accessible to young boys like me in the 1970s had limited control; there was basic automatic exposure and if one was lucky, a couple of fixes shutter speeds.  Like many children of my age, I didn’t understand shutter speed, so automatic was my ‘mode’ of choice.  In not understanding the part that time plays in photography, my early efforts often had motion blur, caused either by the subject moving or a shaky hand.  These accidents were met instantly with a sulk, disposal and the immediate need to find more film to put in my camera.

My first real introduction to the importance of time, or shutter speed was when I was an apprentice engineer.  We used oscilloscope machines to measure waveforms in our electronic circuits, which were displayed on a cathode ray tube screen; an old television essentially.   The line scan of the ‘scope was rapidly repeated in the screen so that the trace remain visible to the eye, but in fact each trace was a fragment of time during which the signal being measured was changing.  If the signal changed in a repeatable way, as in a sinusoidal wave (Photo 1), the trace would look like it was standing still on the screen.

Nevertheless, the only way the user could preserve that image indefinitely was to take a photograph.    In those days, the system of choice was a polaroid pack film camera which would take a single instant picture at a fixed focal length determined by the end of its hood (Photo 2).

The film had a very high ISO of 3000 so that the dimly lit screen could be exposed properly.  What I came to learn though was the single, fixed shutter speed of the camera was still fairly slow (of order 1/30th second), so the trace needed to be stable to get a ‘sharp’ image.  If the circuit being tested changed the trace in any way during the time the shutter was open, the image would have a ghost trace superimposed on it.  Being exuberant teenagers, my colleagues and I used the camera for shooting other subjects in the camera’s focal plane and while mercifully none of these prints survive, I recall us shooting posed portraits, where everything was held as still as possible and more candid shots with movement and anything else that could be captured in the small frame.

“There is a pleasure and beauty in this fragmenting of time that had little to do with what was happening.  It had to do, rather, with seeing the momentary pattern of lines and shapes that had been previously concealed within the flux of movement” – Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye, 2018 (reprint)

When I read this quote in Szarkowski’s book[1], I immediately appreciated what he was saying.  Photography was initially a clinical capturing of a subject or scene, which was very different from classical painting where the artist had to represent their interpretation of something witnessed.  The struggle for photography to establish itself in its infancy as an art form is for me, vindicated by the fact that selecting a slice of real time is possible because of the technical capability that was initially rejected by the art world.  In reviewing Duchamp’s famous painting “Nude Descending a Staircase No 2” [2], we could be forgiven that this cubist depiction of a nude figure represented in a time-lapse style was an influence for photographers of the time.

However, it was painted in 1912, some 25 years after Eadweard Mubridge’s experiments with early camera shutters which resulted in his famous time series photographs [2].  While they cannot really be compared directly owing to the former being a single image and the latter, multiple images, they do both convey what we believe to be fluidity of movement over time.  Muybridge’s most famous image series ‘Horse in Motion’ from 1872 [3] settled a long-time theory that all four hooves of a horse leave the ground during a gallop, and the movement captured highlighted the fact that very small fragments of time are indistinguishable from the sequence they are part of.   Muybridge is subsequently acknowledged as a forefather of the modern motion picture film [3].

In the late 1920s, A.M. Worthington FRS built upon Muybridge’s work by using the ever advancing shutter technology to capture images of splashes and droplets in his study of fluid-dynamics.  Worthington still found that shutters were too slow and so, turned to a combination of very high sensitivity photographic plates and a short duration ‘spark’ timed to illuminate the subject at the point of impact.   The subsequent images are very grainy and inconsistently lit, but of little consequence as Worthington’s work was more about the practical understanding of the effect of collision and dispersal of energy[4] than creating anything artistic.

However, his application of the technical advancements of cameras led others to capture beauty in the laws of physics.   In seeking the beauty that Szarkowski refers to, we start by looking at the work of Harold Edgerton.  During a scientific career, Edgerton pioneered the use of reliable, high speed strobe lights to act as the ultra-fast shutter (of order 1/1,000,000th second[5].  Now photographic detail and quality of reproduction could capture microsecond slices of time and reveal the beauty of the seemingly ordinary.

The image above shows one of Edgerton’s photographs similar to Worthington’s work.  The use of colour enhances the subtle mixing of the dye drop as it impacts the milk and captures the beauty of the physics of nature.

These three photographers are famous for their work in advancing technical understanding rather than art, but their photographs taken on an artistic appeal because of their connection with the natural world, usually missed in real-time.

My Conclusions

In researching this topic, I’ve quickly come to realise the ability to extract a small unit of time from the natural course of events is something that photography can exclusively claim for itself.  The work of Muybridge, Worthington and Edgerton appeals to the engineer in me as with those early days in my career with that ‘scope camera, my intent was to capture something that I knew to be fleeting but was being made static be the oscilloscope itself.  Those repeated fleeting moments that I was trying to capture had the same properties as the subjects they were trying to capture, only their efforts required grabbing the moment as a one off.  As I’ve progressed as a photographer, I’ve naturally understood shutter speed, its place in achieving an exposure and how to use it to capture  instantaneous and evolving slices of time.  However, I hadn’t appreciated until now the use of it in an artistic sense.   Taking DiCorcia’s work as an example, the fleeting moments captured in heads are all different, yet the same.  The beauty for me is the story of which these moments are a part; ‘Where are they going?’, ‘What are they experiencing on their journey?’.  The subjects were all walking through Times Square, going about their lives in a variety of different ways, yet all having the fact that they were ‘trapped’ in the same way in common.  When I saw an exhibition of ‘Heads’ at the Hepworth Gallery, Wakefield in 2014, I was struck by how powerful the private nature of these moments were and how DiCorcia had arranged the lighting to isolate the subject from the environment as if they were experiencing life by themselves.   I’m not surprised that DiCorcia got into legal trouble about the series as we believe our daily lives are our own property.  By capturing a slice of that property without discussion or permission, we  breach that concept of ownership and privacy.

With the ‘pattern of life’ quality of DiCorcia’s work, I concluded that freezing a slice of time isn’t simply a mechanism used to be clever or scientific.  In terms of art, the traction of a moment further adds to the mystery of the story.  With this in mind, I went back to Szarkowski’s book [1] and looked through the collection of photographs to underline my point.  The one that struck me because of its subtle movement was an untitled picture by Garry Winogrand.  The image is of an elephant being fed by hand.

The apparent movement is not obvious, but this is the point following the offer of food and before the elephant feeds.  This photograph is made more intriguing by the exclusion of most of both subjects from the frame. Who is the person feeding the elephant?  Could be a zoo-keeper, but his jacket looks more sixties fashion than uniform. Was he even supposed to be feeding the animals?   This photograph explains much but also leaves the viewer with questions, made possible by the frozen moment and interesting composition used together.

References

[1] Szarkowski, J, “The Photographer’s Eye”, MomA reprint 2018

[2] Chadwick, S, “Introduction to Dada (page 2)”, https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/wwi-dada/dada1/a/marcel-duchamp-nude-descending-a-staircase-no-2, accessed January 2019

[3] Herbert, Alan, “Exhibition Notes”, University of Texas, https://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/permanent/windows/southeast/eadweard_muybridge.html, accessed January 2019

[4] Worthington, A.M, “A Study of Splashes”, 1908

[5] Editorial, Harold Edgerton, Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Harold-Edgerton, accessed January 2019

 

The Brief

Find a location with good light for a portrait shot.  Place your subject some distance in. front of a simple background and select a wide aperture together with a moderately long focal length such as 100mm on a. 35mm full-frame camera (about 65mm on a cropped-frame camera).  Take a viewpoint about one and a half metres from your subject, allowing you to compose a headshot comfortably within the frame.  Focus on the eyes and take the shot.

My Image

Reflection

I shot this photograph in overcast light against the backdrop of a large laurel hedge.  The focal length was 105mm and aperture f2.8 with an ISO of 400.  By getting Jayne to turn her head and look at the camera, only her ‘leading eye’ was in focus.  This is a fairly common practice in portraiture and in this case I wanted to get across how the depth of focus rolls off over a short distance.  The viewer’s eye is drawn into her gaze with the soft detail of her face completing the knowledge that we are looking at her face.  By the time we get past the hair and into the background, the main feature is the deep green of her coat and the background becoming just a texture.

I’ve not taken many portraits, but the ones I have shot have benefitted from reducing the number of distractions in the frame.  Large apertures and flattering focal lengths (anything over 50mm) help focus on the detail and reduce any lens distortion.

The Brief

Does zooming in from a fixed viewpoint change the appearance of things?  If you enlarge and compare individual elements within the first and last shots of the last exercise you can see that their ‘perspective geometry’ is exactly the same.   To change the way things actually appear, a change of focal length needs to be combined with a change in viewpoint.

Select your longest focal length and compose a portrait shot fairly tightly within the frame in front of a background with depth.  Take one photograph.  Then walk towards your subject while zooming out to your shortest focal length.  Take care to frame the subject precisely the same way in the viewfinder and take a second shot.  Compare the images and make notes in your learning log.

My Approach

My approach to this exercise was largely driven by the subject, or lack thereof.  Instead of a portrait of a person as in both the brief and other student work on this exercise, I elected instead to demonstrate the same effect with an inanimate subject while out walking.    I used my Nikon D4 with 70 to 200mm f2.8 lens which combines the ability to zoom over the most generally usable focal lengths and open to a very wide aperture.  For this exercise, however I would need a fairly small to medium aperture in order to preserve background detail in both shots, particularly the one a the longest focal length.  In this case, when the subject is significantly separated from the background the details are lost when the aperture is too wide resulting in the effect the Japanese call ‘bokeh’.

It was an overcast winter day, so the ISO selected was 800 and both photographs were shot at f8 in Aperture Priority Mode.   The subject I settled on was one of Malvern’s Victorian gas lamps.

The Images

 

Reviewing the images

The first challenge with this exercise was finding a subject that had sufficient room in front of it to allow me to move from the 200mm composition to the 70mm.  This lamp is situated on a terrace that provided this distance and also position the subject on a similar plane to my elevation.  However, it’s immediately noticeable that the angle changes that are produced by changing focal length and position when recomposing, causes the lamp to appear elevated in the 70mm image.  This is most noticeable looking at the top cover of the lamp in the 70mm shot, which looks a little compressed.  While the subjects in both photographs look the same, they do have slight differences like this one.

Looking at the background, it is clear the apparent distance to the next pair of lampposts has increased with the shorter focal length and that the tree behind now dominates the background.    An expected consequence of using this subject with the sky behind it is the change in exposure between the two images.  My camera was set to evaluative matrix metering which takes an average across the whole frame.  With the increase in sky behind the subject, the camera’s response was to close down 1 stop to 1/320th second to keep the sky within an acceptable exposure.  The result, of course is the subject being underexposed, but I think the perspective demonstration is effective.

In conclusion, I looked at a number of my own photographs using my collection of lenses for the D4.  I have previously used lens distortion effectively in landscapes to give depth and portraits to present a pleasing representation of the face, but hadn’t noticed the way the a background changes when the subject is maintained ‘close to normal’.