Henri Cartier-Bresson 

• Henri Cartier-Bresson was born on August 22nd, 1908 and was a French humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35 mm film.
• He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment. His work has influenced many photographers.
• His father was a wealthy textile manufacturer, so Henri got the financial support he needed in order to pursue his photography ambition.
• Henri was given his first camera by a man named Harry Crosby who convinced the commandment to release him into his custody from a House arrest for hunting without a licence. They both shared an interest for photography.
• He died on August 3rd, 2004

Image Analysis

Technical: The image uses natural daylight to give a balanced tonal range that may consider it to be apart of the Ansel Adams Zone System.

The image appears to have used a wide lens and angle to allow for the majority of the image to be in focus, where it has a slight blur in the background. This also gives the whole image a feeling of stillness.

I believe it would have been taken with a fast shutter speed to capture the business of the street.

Visual: The image is presented in a Black and white 2D appearance. It is arranged to feature the repetition of the cattle.

Contextual: Cartier-Bresson was driven by a sociological impulse to India to convey the post-colonial development. He went at a turning point in his career as he had a “curiosity about what is going on in the world, a respect for what is going on and a desire to transcribe it visually.” The curiosity would drive a long career in photojournalism, for which his India trip was an apprenticeship.

My Images

Edits

I reduced the brightness to -40, and increased the contrast to 53.

For the above 2 images, I took inspiration from Bruce Gilden’s technique of street photography and took photos of my subject by their suprise.

With the coloured image, I only increased the contrast to 56 on Photoshop. However, for the black and white image, I reduced the saturation before increasing the contrast to 20 and also decreasing the brightness to -12.

For this Image, I looked at the colour schemes of Martin Parr’s work and decided to incorporate this in my edit. This filter on the ‘VSCO’ app gave a similar feel.

I also used the ‘VSCO’ app for the image below however this time I also reduced the exposure.

I liked the style of Henri Cartier-Bresson so decided to edit some of my images in black and white by reducing the saturation. I reduced the brightness and increased contrast to present different tonal ranges.

This is one of my favourite images as it was taken in St Malo, France. I feel as if this makes the image more interesting than an image just being taken in Jersey. I reduced the brightness to -70 and the contrast to -21 as I felt the original image was too bright and warm, and I wanted to show off the shadows.