“Look again at Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photograph Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare in Part Three. (If you can get to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London you can see an original print on permanent display in the Photography Gallery.) Is there a single element in the image that you could say is the pivotal ‘point’ to which the eye returns again and again? What information does this ‘point’ contain?”
[Expressing Your Vision: P104]
In my opinion the pivotal point in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photograph Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare is the man running. When I first looked at this image I thought it was staged. The photographer was either waiting for the people to go by or ask someone to run repeatedly to capture this exact moment. The eye returns again and again to the lower part of the running man. As it almost looks like he man is in the air, you analyze first how no part of his foot is touching the ground. Then you move to the reflection in the water and the top part of the ladder but your eye never really leaves that right part of the image. After a while you can concentrate on the foreground and a background but the running man is drawing your attention back even in the final seconds of looking.
I still cannot believe that this photograph was down to luck.
When I first look at the image of Rinko Kawauchi’s photograph mentioned above I felt surprised. The subject itself is not very interesting, it has been photographed a lot and there is a certain stereotype of how a good photograph of a rose should look like. I like Rinko’s idea of using light to give an image of a mundane rose more poetic and extraordinary meaning.
martalis 