While I think that Eric Kim in his blog post 10 Lessons Josef Koudelka Has Taught Me About Street Photography considerably overstates the obvious, most of it is good advice, and what shines through is his enthusiasm about photography and Koudelka’s work.
Although I’m also a fan of Koudelka, and have several of his books, including Gypsies and Chaos which I think are perhaps his most important works, I think Kim goes rather over the top about him – as he also does in his features on Lee Friedlander and Daido Moriyama among others. But there are some nice links to a couple of videos and his Magnum page, as well as to his books.
Incidentally I paid £14.50 for my copy of his Gypsies, the 1975 UK edition which I find is now offered on-line at over £200. The more recent version had more images and is better printed and available second-hand for around $50. Photographic books can be a decent investment, though mine tend to become rather worn, which cuts their value. But many others I bought are probably worth less than I paid for them.
Although it’s nice to be able to hold a book and leaf through it, I think you can learn just as much from Koudelka’s work on line. There are photo books that really work well as books and are not just collections of images, where the sequence and the ability to look back and forward really matter, or where the print quality of the images is vital, but I don’t think this is so with Koudelka’s work. In general I think it works as well on screen – for example at Magnum – as it does in print or even in actual photographic prints, perhaps with the exception of his panoramic work, which really needs to be seen on a greater scale. Some in the Chaos book are reproduced as 22×9 inch double page spreads.
I like Kim’s enthusiasm and willingness to research for these posts of his, but when I read some of his other “10 Lessons” posts it becomes blindingly clear that he has very limited knowledge about these photographers
Like when he admitted he wasn’t familiar with Eggleston, but bought a $300 book based on Charlie Kirk’s recommendation — it speaks to his enthusiasm but, I don’t know, callowness?. I admire his willingness to study photographers he doesn’t get, but to then quickly turn around and tell us what it all means is somewhat presumptuous, even more so that he now travels around the world giving street photo workshops to hundreds of students.
A very well-known street photographer was a guest of his in one of his workshops and he was not impressed with the end-results and said that the instruction was pretty basic stuff. Apparently lots of software engineers are into street photography thee days….
Back to Koudelka: one of my favorite photographers. I think I saw him in the late 80s in NYC when the ICP did a show of his work. The only book of his I own is Chaos, would love to pick up a copy of Gypsies some day.
I have both the old a new “Gypsies” and there are considerable differences in the printing of individual photographs between them. Some are “better” IMHO others are not. There are cropping differences as well. Some previously unpublished shots and a radical order change.
Don’t forget most libraries, use them or loose them, in the UK can order a copy of the original in, an option I have frequently used and am always surprised at how few issues they have made for even very rare books.
Back in the old days I got quite a few books via my local library, including some fairly rare and expensive volumes from Boston Spa. Then it was free or the charge was nominal, and library staff welcomed the challenge of finding rare books, though it sometimes took several months to get them.
But I don’t think it is so easy or cheap now at least where I live.
There has been a huge street photography bubble in recent years, with almost everyone owning a camera claiming to be a street photographer. I think much of it is more about not wanting to get involved with any serious approach to either your subject matter or the medium, though there are exceptions. As I’ve I think made clear in some previous posts I think there are both positive and negative aspects to this.
What I would like to see far more is an acknowledgement of the work of many photographers in this country in the broad area over the thirty or forty years before a new generation claimed to have introduced street photography to the UK a few years ago. I remember talking with one of them and finding he had never even heard of Tony Ray Jones or John Benton-Harris (nor come to that knew much of the US tradition of which both were a part.)
Peter, I completely agree that a grounding in good street photography from the last several decades is essential in opening one’s mind to the possibilities, the tropes, and what have become the cliches. Without an understanding of what’s been done (and done to death) people who are interested in the genre can easily end up repeating old mistakes they don’t need to. Lately I’ve seen people latch onto those with limited experience who act as teachers and then end up making trendy images reinforced by an internet echo chamber of poor or uninformed feedback. (And these teachers seem to make a tidy sum with their workshops and bootcamps.)
It’s not just street photography, though. God help you if someone asks on a forum about ‘a good portrait lens’ and you dare note that historically the best portraits made by masters used normal or even slightly wide lenses – you’ll get pummeled by gearheads with limited experience who insist that you need a minimum 85mm lens, and learn that their definition of ‘portrait’ is a head-and-shoulders shot or closer. And newbies will accept that because they don’t know better, perhaps because they see a trend of close-up portraits, because many articles on the net make a big deal about limited DoF and bokeh, and of course because camera companies make money selling ‘portrait’ lenses.
I have been doing street photography since I was a kid in Brooklyn in the 70s and first saw photos of Bruce Davidson’s photos of street gangs. I didn’t know the term street photography, the ICP probably had not even been founded yet, but I suddenly understood that it was permissible and *interesting* to use the procedures and strictures of journalism for non-journalistic purposes.
It is possible to make good photographs while being ignorant the history and best works in the genres in which you are interested, but it’s much more difficult.
So true about the internet. Sites where being labelled as an expert usually simply means you have made many ill-informed posts!
And if you are going to worry much about ‘bokeh’ I think there has to be something seriously lacking in the content of the images. I’ve no idea whether my lenses have good or bad bokeh and it’s never occurred to me to care. I’ve made use at times of limited depth of field, but it’s only relevant to a tiny fraction of images.
When I started in photography there was a lot of nonsense around in the photo magazines and particularly clubs about the ‘rules of composition’ and the experts would tell me that I was doing things wrong. Back to what ChrisL was saying about libraries, I’d been interested by a picture or two I’d seen by Minor White, and ordered up some large expensive volume by him and eventually it arrived, and in it his ‘Three Canons’ one of which was “Let the subject generate its own composition.”
Bruce Davidson’s work got you interested and got you working and I’m sure started you on a path of discovery of your own capabilities and one in which you were keen to see what others had done. And seeing and knowing the work of others gives us all more on which to build our own views.
The new Gary Winogrand book has a number of really detailed and intense essays (disclaimer- still reading) which consider his work in a historical context and reveal much about the direction meaning and purpose of his work. It is so far from what the “web” considers street work ( and they would claim Winogrand as one of their own I suspect) that we are talking different planets. His notorious reticence to discuss his work does seem to be the last thing many modern street shooters would succumb to.
Living out in the sticks has few advantages but one is that library staff still think it is the 1950/60’s :-)
The Winogrand book sounds interesting, but I’ve yet to read it. I did write about him some years ago, and watched and read quite a lot of material at the time. Of course its good that the work is looked at again by someone who knew him and his work well.
http://www.artnews.com/2013/03/27/garry-winogrand-retrospective/
I’ve also talked about him with John Benton-Harris who knew him back in New York and has some stories about working with him on the street – and also largely organised the great Barbican show ‘American Images’ in 1985 that made us in the UK much more aware of the work of him and others.
Chris, I don’t think Winogrand was reticent as much as he purposefully spoke in oblique terms, specifically about good street photography solving the ‘problem’ of the tension between form and content. OC Garza has a nice write-up about his classes with Winogrand at UT in the 70s, which you can read as a pdf here:
http://www.ocgarzaphotography.com/documents/ClassTimewithGarryWinograndfinal3.pdf
Garza says at one point, “That is one of the semantics games that Garry liked to play so we would learn “to see” on our own. It would have taken Garry all of five minutes to explain this theory but that wasn’t his way. He distracted us with semantic games so we could discover the process of taking art photographs basically on our own”
And that rings true to me. If you watch/read/listen to some of his many interviews (like videotaped ones on Youtube with Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel and Bill Moyers) you find someone being generally forthcoming though somewhat evasive on specifics. But if you follow through what he says becomes clear.
Indeed, reticent was, in retrospect, poorly chosen.
Verichrome, that link is much appreciated, new to me although I have read other accounts on the web that one is particularly detailed.