Archive for January, 2012

Phillip Toledano, Abu Ghraib Bobble-head figurine, 2008 This item is atrocious isn’t it? The worst possible taste – a toy figure celebrating a photograph of torture. Its creator, Phillip Toledano, made it as part of an installation on the disasters of the Bush presidency, now thankfully behind us: “AMERICA THE GIFT SHOP is an installation […]


Cinemagraph

25Jan12

Jamie Beck & Kevin Burg Jamie Beck & Kevin Burg are two New York artists working in the field of fashion photography, she is a photographer, he is a digital media specialist. The combination of their talents has produced a series of startling images, fashion stills that move. They have branded this technique ‘Cinemagraph,’  cinema-photograph. […]


When you see the film Lawrence of Arabia on the big screen you realize how great its Director of Photography Freddie Young was. He won an Oscar for it. But I’m not just talking about Young as a cinematographer, I’m referring to the composed shots that appear on the screen as beautiful still images, as […]


Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment, 1952. Cover, Henri Matisse I recently had the privilege of looking through Cartier-Bresson’s 1952 book, The Decisive Moment. It sells for $2000 these days. The Decisive Moment is a legendary book, a retrospective of his photographic work that established his prestige and inserted a new phrase into photographic terminology… “…if […]


John Loengard:  “Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare St Lazare, 1932. Paris Hands: Georges Févre, 5/11/87″ Magnum photographer John Loengard photographed the actual negative of Cartier-Bresson’s famous image, “Behind the Gare St Lazare, 1932″. It reveals some fascinating secrets about this picture. Inverting the image in Photoshop shows how it would look in a contact print. […]


Henri Cartier-Bresson had a famous habit of turning photographs upside-down and sideways to test the strength of their composition. If a picture still worked upside-down, there must be some validity to its design. If an upside-down picture doesn’t work, then it must be relying too much on its subject-matter. It would just be a record […]


Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare St Lazare, Paris, 1932 Cartier-Bresson’s famous photograph was shot behind the Gare St Lazare, the large railway station in the north of the city. He was shooting through an iron fence, across a flooded yard, with the rear of the station in the background. I’ve figured out the location of […]



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