{"id":5847,"date":"2015-12-21T11:28:31","date_gmt":"2015-12-21T11:28:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=5847"},"modified":"2015-12-21T11:28:31","modified_gmt":"2015-12-21T11:28:31","slug":"place-de-leurope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=5847","title":{"rendered":"Place de l&#8217;Europe"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not a great fan of appropriation, or as a friend once called it, &#8220;<em>f**king with other people&#8217;s work<\/em>&#8220;, but there are exceptions, and this is one:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"giphy-embed\" src=\"\/\/giphy.com\/embed\/3o8dp9JRzGG40LexNu\" width=\"480\" height=\"600\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/giphy.com\/gifs\/thefyp-3o8dp9JRzGG40LexNu\">via GIPHY<\/a><\/p>\n<p>(It&#8217;s also worth visiting the <a href=\"http:\/\/fuckyeahphotographer.tumblr.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">original site<\/a> on which this appears, where there is among other things, <a href=\"http:\/\/fuckyeahphotographer.tumblr.com\/post\/135443745036\/episode-8-printed-matter\" target=\"_blank\"><b>Episode #8 <\/b>Printed Matter<\/a>,\u00a0 which tells you exactly how much <em>Vice<\/em> cares for photographers.)<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not sure that <em>Henri Cartier Bresson<\/em> had much of a sense of humour, though there is certainly and acute wit behind some of his pictures, which doesn&#8217;t really come across in the various films about him. I suspect too, that there are some at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.henricartierbresson.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Fondation in Paris<\/a> who won&#8217;t approve.<\/p>\n<p>The picture on which it is based is one of the first I wrote about at any length, and I remember making a rather disappointing pilgrimage to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.urbanpicnic-streetphotography.com\/inspiration\/place-de-leurope-gare-saint-lazare-1932\/\" target=\"_blank\">Place de l\u2019Europe \u2013 Gare Saint Lazare<\/a> 40 years after he made this picture in 1932. I won&#8217;t today add to the the yards of mainly nonsense that have been written about the &#8216;<em>Decisive Moment<\/em>&#8216; for which this picture is always the prime exhibit since I&#8217;ve done so before, but for me it exemplifies a much more important rule, which also has vital implications outside of photography, the rule that &#8216;<em>Rules are made to be broken<\/em>&#8216;.\u00a0 Cartier-Bresson&#8217;s dictum that photographers should show their work without cropping as they conceived it in the viewfinder at the point of exposure has influenced generations of photographers, usually for the worse.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not a great fan of cropping. I like to frame precisely (something the Leica that HCB used at least in his early years wasn&#8217;t really capable of doing) and I hope incisively. But it isn&#8217;t always possible. You may not be able or have time to get into the right position (sorry Mr White, but time only stands still for static photographs.)<\/p>\n<p>This isn&#8217;t HCB&#8217;s only cropped photograph, though it is perhaps his most drastically cropped image, and certainly his most famous cropped image. Even for him, practicalities sometimes had to overcome theory.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"http:\/\/mylondondiary.co.uk\/2015\/12\/blog\/Jour_de_pluie_a_Paris.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"450\" height=\"344\" \/><br \/>\n<em>La Place de l&#8217;Europe, temps de pluie<\/em> is also one of my favourite paintings by Gustave Caillebotte, though it isn&#8217;t based on the Place de L&#8217;Europe but a few yards to the north-east in the rue de Turin, looking towards the Place de Dublin, as Wikipedia details in <em>Paris Street, Rainy Day<\/em>. Caillebotte did paint La Place de l&#8217;Europe, and there are a couple of his pictures, as well as one by another artist on the <a href=\"https:\/\/fr.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Place_de_l'Europe_%28Paris%29\" target=\"_blank\">French page for the Place<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Caillebotte&#8217;s image, as the Paris Street article makes very clear, very much based on photographic ways of seeing, perhaps why it appeals to me, with its central division by a lamp post something that many of us have played with over the past years &#8211; something I picked up on from both Walker Evans and Lee Friedlander, and that curious space produced by the buildings in the left half. And that cropping is so photographic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not a great fan of appropriation, or as a friend once called it, &#8220;f**king with other people&#8217;s work&#8220;, but there are exceptions, and this is one: via GIPHY (It&#8217;s also worth visiting the original site on which this appears, where there is among other things, Episode #8 Printed Matter,\u00a0 which tells you exactly how &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=5847\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Place de l&#8217;Europe<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photo-history","category-photo-issues"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5847"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5852,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5847\/revisions\/5852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}