Henri Cartier-Bresson was a photographic genius, a giant of street photography without even trying, and later in life, someone who did not even recognize himself for his previous photographic greatness, as his many fans and followers did. He actually quit photography, avoided interviews and his picture being taken, and took up drawing and sketching.
For those of you who know who he was, this little bio is already quite familiar. For those of you who don't know the man, you might have seen his photos, or at least perhaps some taken by the countless photographers who came after him, influenced by his singular style. Carter-Bresson is also famous for coining the phrase and concept of "the decisive moment" – the instant at which all elements within the frame come together, composition is just right, and the shutter gets pushed to capture that irreproducible instant on film forever. I burn through rolls and rolls of film before capturing that decisive instant in which every part of the scene that caused you to lift the camera to the ready in the first place come together, then in less than an eyeblink, break their fleeting formation and disparately part from each other forever.
Such is the nature of "street photography," I discovered the canon of street photography late in the game, well after discovering the wonders of photography in 7th grade. Without a subject, and living in Ohio, there wasn't much to snap. There's a reason why all the major "schools" of street photography are really just world-class cities that simply are full of hustle and bustle, action and reaction. New York City, Paris, Chicago, Tokyo. I would add Seoul to that list. Seoul is indeed so "dynamic" (I hate using Korean government tourist board catchprases) that getting decent pictures on the street here is not so difficult. Even a novice with a consumer digital camera and the will to use it will get something interesting if they are patient and know where to look.
A devoted and determined street photographer will get some startling images. In order to capture these moments, though, what I quickly learned is that you have to know people, the environment, and how the two interact. It also helps to know the language and understand the "culture" – which is another way of saying that you should know the patterns of thought, motion, and movement. To me, knowing how to name the parts of the hanbok means nothing – that's doesn't reflect a knowledge of the people around you. Real knowledge of the people and surroundings allows you to predict pictures and stick around past a woman's fighting off her man's attempts to get her into a love motel, who thereafter storms off in a huff, hails a taxi, proceeds to sit in said taxi for two or three minutes, then return to the her waiting man with her arms crossed, whereupon they both entered, presumably to party all night, until the "morning calm" – or at least for a few hours, whichever comes first.
It allows you to see, from a woman's arm going into her purse, from her increasingly halting gait, as well as from the kind of clothes she wears, that she is going to pull out her compact to check herself right in the middle of the street. Or that ajussi in front of you is going to hawk a chunky one right there on the sidewalk. The list of examples is endless, as is the number of times I've been wrong, and have internally proven my assumptions and stereotypes about the people I see completely wrong. My timing has also been off, and I have usually miss more moments than I have successfully capture. Most of my pictures are complete failures, and a look at any of my rolls shows slight variations on the same subject, most of which go right into my mental "reject" pile.
But perseverance defines the nature of the true street photographer. Out of a roll of 36 frames of film, one image in which the elements come together into something approximating a "decisive moment" sends a chill down the spine of a true blue street shooter – sitting hunched over long strips of film, squinting through a loupe when you realize that you got that kick-ass shot you hoped for – such are the moments worth living for. If you don't get that feeling – or the digital equivalent – you just ain't street. If you don't live for those shots, it's not in your blood.
The photographer who defines "street" for me is undoubtedly Garry Winogrand. In my eyes, he is the kingpin-mack-daddy-grandmaster-pimp of street photography; what's more, his photographic eye is the same as mine. Or, maybe I should more respectfully say – my eye resembles his. I consider myself lucky, though, to have been blissfully ignorant to the legacy of the great street photographers whose strong styles would certainly have influenced mine had I been a good little visual arts or photography major. When I came back to Korea in 2002, after having spent a couple years in the Korean sticks from 1994-1996, I was ready and rarin' to shoot. Luckily, as a Berkeley grad student, I had registration access to the School of Journalism, where I was able to slip into a 15-person-only documentary photo class taught by accomplished documentary photographer Ken Light. The class was actually set up as a series of guest lecturers, which included people such as Susan Meiselas, Sebastio Selgado, and other people I certainly didn't deserve to meet, not in my state of extreme ignorance of photo history. Imagine a beginning cyclist getting face time with Lance Armstrong, a 7th-grade beginner on the violin getting a master class with Itzhak Perlman, or a freshman film student getting to co-direct with Quentin Tarantino. That was basically me.
I didn't deserve three weeks of Susan Meiselas's input into my photo project, Ken Light's ongoing input and support, meeting the photo editor from the Sacramento Bee, or even the company of my fellow students in the class, all of whom were working journalists and photographers. But I did benefit – not in terms of skills, as the class wasn't about technical matters, and you had to already have had a portfolio of stuff to get into the class – but it was about fixing one's approach as a photographer and documenter of other people's lived realities. Developing my own style and a certain kind of sensitivity were the crucial things I gained from the experience, which really prepared me to hit the ground running when I arrived in Korea.
Combined with my previous, extensive experience here, I knew what I wanted to shoot; my mind was full of the many instants I now wished I had captured when I had been a babe-in-the-woods nearly a decade previous. But thankfully, I lacked exposure to the giants of street photography, a genre that still exists waaaay under the radar of even the most interested photo and art enthusiasts and advanced amateurs. It was actually quite easy to not know about Garry Winogrand until I had myself developed enough as a photographer to start hungering to find other photographers with whom I now knew I shared a photographic style.
So when I came across Winogrand in an amazing book entitled – appropriately enough – Bystander : A History of Street Photography, and came across just a few of Winogrand's shots, I got that tingle. But the weird and amazing thing was that they weren't my pictures – they were his. Still, I felt like I had taken them. That's when I knew I had found my mentor, albeit posthumously and well after the fact of my nascent development as a street photographer.
But I wouldn't have it any other way, as I was lucky to be able to appreciate and connect with Winogrand across the long stretches of time as well as my previous complete ignorance of his existence. As I mentioned above, my comfort with having someone who shared my passion for the street, lust for capturing the mundaneness of the everyday, and even a persistent and unabashed obsession with women as focused through a voracious male "gaze" – all had been Winogrand's first. I was floored. By the time I had perused most of his most famous images online, and after having finally bought a new collection of his work over Amazon, my journey as a photographer, to reveal the cheesy Star Wars melodramatic mode I unfortunately operate in, was now complete.
No longer did I have to feel guilty about my photographic impulses; I now believed what I had always suspected: that I shouldn't second-guess the purity of the impulse to shoot. That instinct is so strong and direct, not much else in life approaches that level of pure will and a feeling of possessing absolute purpose. To allow the standard socialized fear of breaking propriety, appearing "strange" in the eyes of others, receiving dirty looks, or even the fear of being physically challenged to mitigate and destroy this feeling was something I knew I should not do. Winogrand had, without his having ever known or imagined it, influenced me as much as any significant mentor in my life.
And people react to him in the same way as people react to me – they either see what he's trying to do with his camera, or they label him a hack, pervert, technically incompetent, or all of the above. Who knows? Maybe my motivations are base, "problematic," or even – *SHUDDER – inappropriate. But I think that this results in good pictures, after the several rounds of editing that take place when looking at the negatives, choosing frames to scan, and then obsessing over which are really good enough to put out there in the public eye. I think the pictures I choose are more than just the sum of the base elements of my peculiar pathologies.
Or maybe I'm AM just a pervert. I think the subway shot below says something, although what is being said is open to interpretation. Some people think I'm just trying to get upskirt shots. Well, I can only say that I think this is a bit different from the hidden camera snaps that some Japanese men like to take of women in the subways. Of course, there may be some overlap between me and them, but somehow I think I keep my decisions to present a photograph well above the belt.
Or take a look at Winogrand's famous shot from his series in the Bronx Zoo. The signs and and mental markers are inescapably racist. I personally do not know if Winogrand was a racist or not, although I did not see that reflected in the rest of his work. There are shots that make note of the obvious differences between the races, but those could easily be understood to have been taken in a critical capacity. Does the fact that racist codes are blaring out of the image make Winogrand a racist? He surely tapped into an gut, unadulterated response when taking this picture; I doubt that he had time to feel guilty about the "motivations" for taking the picture as a white man in the turbulent and contentious Sixties, especially of what is ostensibly and interracial couple. Had I been in the same position at the same time, would I have felt guilty about my motivations for taking this picture? Maybe. Would I have taken it? Hells, yeah.
As for the picture of the running couple below, which appeared in the pages of the Seoul Selection newsletter as well, this represents the kind of "decisive moment" that Cartier-Bresson talked about, but was taken in the particularly Winograndish mode in which I always shoot. But even within this style, my own characteristics are readily apparent. One major difference between me and Winogrand, for example, is the fact that I usually shoot without looking through the viewfinder. I am sure this would make Winogrand roll over in his grave, as would Cartier-Bresson, for they both stressed exact control over composition. I've read that Winogrand's style was one of always looking through the lens, even if meant bringing up the camera to his eye in a quick flash and shooting, then bringing the camera down again.
But my kind of shooting brings about particular problems. Cartier-Bresson is reported to have shot with a "normal lens" of around 50mm, which for me is a zoom lens. In order to get two people in a frame, you have to stand back quite a bit. Since I like to get right up next to and amongst my subjects, a 50mm would yield me a lot of head shots and body parts. So my longest lens is a 28mm, and my "normal" is a 24mm. 20mm is getting a little wide for me, but I do use it sometimes. The problem in the street is that since I am such tight quarters with people, most of the time, I'd compromise myself and the moment by bringing the camera up to my face. And since I have relatively ample room for error with a 24mm frame, even at close range, I would rather compromise a bit with composition and if necessary crop a bit later (although I try not to change the aspect ratio, or the dimensions of a 35mm film frame). In fact, I tend to prefer the added element of surprise and chance in my shooting.
In the case of the picture below, however, I can't actually remember for certain, but I am pretty sure I composed as I looked through the viewfinder. This couple had been too caught up in their own interaction to notice me, as he had just completed playfully "stealing" the ice cream cone he had just bought her, and was making a show of walking off and eating her prize, as she looks on in surprised amusement. In retrospect, I don't think there would have been a need for me to shoot from the hip.
I do sometimes regret the compromise of composition for capturing the moment, but I stand by the choice. The picture below demonstrates exactly what I am talking about, since composition is clearly compromised. The two young couples are captured in the frame doing very distinct and different things, and there is a sort of interaction going on between both pairs of people – one active and oblivious of being shot, the other being relaxed and totally nonchalant even as they see me shooting them – but the head of the man to the far left is guillotined by my composition. Argh! The perfect picture would have been possible had the camera been up a little higher – compromising a few inches of her thigh just below the skirtline and everything on that level of the frame would have constituted a painless cropping choice for the benefit of getting the tall man's expression in reaction to his female companion. Her pose is perfect, as she's caught right in the middle of the interaction, her arms perfectly placed – one wrapped around his, the other in a relaxed position of repose – and she's in a relaxed mid-stride that contrasts with his apparent non-chalant or even standoffish stance. To this day, I'll never know what his expression is, and even writing about this is killing me.
As for the couple that is the main element of the shot, their "whatever" and "don't-give-a-fuck" non-chalance is eminently cool and the fact that they're both catching me in the act is priceless. It defines an intimate moment in which the viewer is made to pay a price for the pleasure of their visual spectatorship. The girl has the appearance on being young, sassy, and sexy – perfectly matched with a cool-as-beans boyfriend who has casually thrown an arm around her, as she casually hooks her fingertips upon his.
The two stances and interactions are so great and strike such an interesting contrast to each other that thinking about the cut-off head is downright painful. But on the other hand, had I put the camera to my eye, I am nearly certain that the girl would have instantly moved to cover her face, move out of frame, or otherwise self-consciously try and prevent herself from appearing in a picture. The boy may have been more non-plussed about a random camera snapping his shot, but even that isn't certain. In any case, I am sure I would have lost that priceless look of theirs in the time it took me to make the swift motion of bringing the camera up. And making sudden movements with large black objects in close range to complete strangers is not something that you would want to do. Again, in the Korean context, on the Korean street, my techniques are born out.
