Bruce Gilden

Who and what:

Bruce Gilden (born 1946) is an American street photographer. He is best known for his candid close-up photographs of people on the streets of New York City, using a flashgun. He has had various books of his work published, has received the European Publishers Award for Photography and is a Guggenheim Fellow. Gilden has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1998. He was born in Brooklyn, New York.

About his style and technique:

Photographer Title Theme – Candid Black and White Photographer

Bruce’s style is defined by the dynamic accent of his pictures, his special graphic qualities, and his original and direct manner of shooting the faces of passers-by with a flash. Gilden is also very prone to shooting in extremely close proximity to his “models”, so close in in-fact that a lot of the people he photographs think he’s photographing someone being them which makes them feel more part of the image and gives them a more natural and interesting facial and bodily expression. Gilden’s powerful images in black and white and now in colour have brought the Magnum photographer worldwide fame. Bruce has been known to walk on certain sides of streets and locate himself in certain places he believes give the most diverse and interesting range of people and actions to capture in his portraits.

Bruces inspiration stems from a large fascination of his to do with capturing the energy, the stress and the anxiety of busy city life. He uses flash in a large proportion of his photos and is very selective on the characters he shoots. In one video he quotes, “I look for characters, things that make an impression on me. Someone who’s not the average looking person.”

One of his famous quotes is “If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, its a street photograph”. This quote captures his ethos of trying to take photos that fully represent the non pictorial qualities like emotions and moods of people in the city and those that come with city life.

Video Links:

 

 

 

Images:

 

 

 

Favourite image and analysis:

 

This is my favourite image because of the anger it carries through the texture of the photography.

Technical features of this photo include;

• An artificial flash gun light along with dull daylight.
• A macro lens used to distinguish the smallest of facial features.
• A greater exposure and shutter speed to capture the minute changes in colour and the variety and true form of the main colours.
• A higher saturation to give the photo some more warmth and colour.

Visual features of this photo include;

• A very intricate texture with little noise in the photo but a lot of texture.
• An extremely high sharpness and high levels of colour saturaion
• A kind of 2D shape, made 3D by the small patched shadow areas and of out of focus scenery behind the model
• There is also a high contrast to other colours in the photo and shadows are very prominant  to enhance the facial features.

Contextual and Conceptual features of this photograph;

• This photograph is part of a project carried out by Bruce Gilden called ‘Portraits’ which aimed to capture very different and diverse looking people who captured Bruce’s attention. There may be a personal context that Bruce applies with these photos as-well due to his rough up bringing he maybe feels like these people are those he was destined to end up among if he hadn’t have found photography.
• The conceptual essence behind these portraits and portraits in general is to capture the whole environmental feeling from the place the photo was taken. For example emotions like anger and stress can come across from this photo due to unknown reasons. Or street photography portraits can capture the chaos that occurs in a city.

 

Why Bruce Gilden?

Out of all of the case studies I have completed so far on photographers, Bruce has come across to me as the most genuine, realistic and diverse photographers around. I love his confident style in shooting up close with a flash gun and not caring what other people think of him or his work for example he once quoted “nobody can tell me a picture isn’t good if  think its good  “. I also love his approach to finding who he’s going to shoot by looking for people who are “different” and not fitting into society because it makes them interesting. I also finally like the way he tries to capture emotions and feelings of city life in his portraits because I personally think street photography is all about not capturing an image necessarily but capturing a mood, emotion or vibe from a person or place.