Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) was a legendary photographer best known for being a father of photojournalism and street photography and for the promotion of a paradigm he called the decisive moment. Along with Brassai, Cartier-Bresson is probably the most influential European photographer of the Twentieth Century, a trained painter, master of photographic composition and a founding member of Magnum.

Yet, the previous paragraph is a profound understatement of Henri Cartier-Bresson and the complexity and sheer life experience of the man behind the camera. This review can barely touch on Cartier-Bresson’s life story. To that end, the Internet provides ample anecdotes and history.

My copy of Henri Cartier-Bresson: Photographer is in constant use – a solid 338 pages measuring 30.5 x 29 x 3.3 centimetres and weighs 2.7 kilograms. It is a beautifully made book of 155 black and white photographs and worth absolutely every penny. The photographs within were selected by Cartier-Bresson and he gives insight into many of them during interviews for the documentary Henri Cartier-Bresson: l’amour tout court. This documentary is available on YouTube in five parts – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5.

The book spans work from the whole of Cartier-Bresson’s career and includes photojournalism as well as many iconic photographs made between the employed moments in his life. The prostitutes, the boy on the country road who walked on his hands, the social, tranquil and profound. The documentary mentioned above is great to watch for those explanations behind the photographs, too. It brings many of them to life like personal memoirs – his mother never liked him hanging out with the prostitutes; he took two photographs of the stairs but only showed the one with the child and not the one of the priest; he set up the scene for his most famous photograph – Plate 14: Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, 1932 – and fired the camera through a hole in the fence embracing luck as much as opportunity and preparation. That photograph was said to be the best taken in the Twentieth Century.

In my world Henri Cartier-Bresson: Photographer is everything that I’m looking for in a photography book. It has quality, durability and ongoing fascination.

In a world saturated in images of every quality, taste and intention there is one skill that needs to be refined – how to look at photographs. This is as important to the general populace of consumer as it is for the aspiring or skilled photographer. On Looking at Photographs: A Practical Guide by Magnum photographer David Hurn in conversation with Bill Jay is about setting you along that path and, while I’m not sold that it’s as cut and dry as photography versus art, it was an insightful read.

They are concerned with the difference between what a photograph is OF as opposed to what it is ABOUT. These are two entirely different things. A photograph of a ship could be about a holiday brochure shot, the ship your family immigrated aboard or a study of large metal industrial behemoths. And the question arises within the photographer of what to show and what to exclude; itself, a manipulation of the photographer’s message. Hurn and Jay are interested in what makes a good photograph – the photographer’s intent, how well it’s been realised and whether it was worth the effort.

Because photographs are never definitive statements about anything. They are open to interpretation as much by the culture, beliefs and socio-economic standing of the viewer as from any accompanying text by the photographer. Photographs mean different things when you see them in different venues – for example, a photograph of a working man in the union trades hall may be an entirely different take on that same photograph on a widow’s mantle-piece. Rich versus poor, nationality, level of education, sophistication and political persuasion all come to the photograph through the viewer independent of the photographer’s wish to push their own agenda.

I particularly agree with a statement they made about style in photography because I see so many photographer’s trying to invent a Photoshopped signature in images that might be about consistency but not about their style. They write that style is not like a filter…

A unique style emerges in photography by ignoring it, concentrating on the subject, and allowing care, passion and knowledge to bubble to the surface through a lot of hard work over a long period of time.

A photographer’s style will become evident in hindsight by looking back at the work and noting the patterns and qualities of what their work produced.

This book covers a lot of ground and to balance it out I’d suggest you also read John Szarkowski’s Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art. Each book comes from their individual perspective and it’s just as important to understand the photojournalistic idea of a good photograph as it is to appreciate the work of art that hangs on a gallery wall with a hefty price tag.

Brassai (1899-1984) was a Transylvanian painter who arrived in Paris in 1923 under his real name, Gyula Halasz. He was 24 years old and fell in with the “poets and painters of Montmartre and Montparnasse – young men like Picasso and Dali and Braque.” These circles were the centre of the European art world – Man Ray, Rene Clair, Andre Kertesz. In fact, it was Kertesz who loaned Brassai a camera to start him on the path to photography master.

Reading the essay introduction to Brassai: Museum of Modern Art, New York, by John Szarkowksi offers an insight into the middle aged Brassai and his approach to making a simple photograph.

Brassai is probably most famous for documenting Paris and it’s seedier culture, particularly at night, through the lens of his Voigtlander Bergheil 6.5 x 9, a camera still in his hands along with a rickety old tripod when this book was made in 1968. “After twenty years you can begin to be sure what a camera will do,” he said. Many of our most enduring images of famous artists in Paris in the early part of the Twentieth Century were taken by Brassai.

His words speak volumes to the modern photographer with the technology in hand to create flawless images at zero cost using a machine gun digital methodology:

Yes, I only take one or two or three pictures of a subject, unless I get carried away; I find it concentrates one more to shoot less. Of course it’s chancy; when you shoot a lot you stand a better chance, but then you are subjecting yourself to the law of accident – if accident has a law. I prefer to try and if necessary fail. When I succeed, however, I am much happier than I would be if I shot a million pictures on the off-chance. I feel that I have really made it myself, that picture, not won it in a lottery.Brassai

Brassai also passionately disbelieved in specialisation in any single medium – he excelled at photography, drawing, painting, writing, sculpting, filmmaking, theatre decor and engraving. At the point of Szarkowski’s book, the subject of this review, Brassai had published an impressive 15 books and made a global impact in numerous creative fields.

My love of Brassai’s photography is his willingness to embrace shadows and darkness along with light and contrast. His eye gives us humour, elegance and a profound understanding of structure that probably comes from his formal training as a young painter.

I feel a little meek that I find night photography daunting with a contemporary DSLR and fast glass or even the 30 year old Bronica ETRS medium format film camera. Brassai shot Paris at night between World Wars using a Heliar f4.5 lens of the era. An amazing technical feat in photography.

If you haven’t seen a lot of Brassai photography you should keep him in mind. I find that nearly every time I open this book I become aware of deeper facets in the images. It’s a book that keeps giving.

Diane Arbus (1923-1971) was definitely a photographer’s photographer. I absolutely love Norman Mailer’s 1971 quote: “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.” She was the photographer who focused on the freaks and described them as people who had “already passed their test in life.” She wrote “They’re aristocrats.”

Of course, these were through the times in the United States where there were the so-called “Ugly Laws”… intended to stop freaks from going into cafes and diners and public places. They were laws intended to get the disturbing off the street so society could fool itself that normalcy was somehow normal. So, while viewing Diane Arbus’ work, I can’t avoid the conscious echo that super-imposed on her images are the footprints of a society that was beating these people down.

And Diane Arbus, of course, was a disturbed soul in her own right. She committed suicide in 1971 in her 40s… relatively young.

Her work is blunt. Her photographs are a surviving document of the flaws and the differences between human beings through the facilitating perspective of an empathic communicator. In Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph, printed in 1972 (a year after her death), the reader is exposed to a selected array of her work in the spirit of the values and ideals that she held through her life. The iconic “Child with a hand grenade in Central Park, NYC 1962″; “Tattooed man at a carnival, Md 1970″; and, “A young [black] man and his pregnant [white] wife in Washington Square Park, NYC 1965″.

While we may make photographs as observers, documenters or collaborators there are certain truths that constrain the resulting artifacts. The photographer chooses what to include or omit from photographs. The photographer selects the correct exposure, the angles and the light. The photographer brings an inevitable bundle of political and social belief systems into the selection and creation of the subject matter.

Looking through the eyes of Diane Arbus is to inhale a social comment about humanity. Why do we ostracise the different? Why are we mesmerised by twins and triplets, or nudists or transvestites?

This is an incredible body of work and nobody would argue that Diane Arbus was anything but a master of her craft and an influence for future generations.

Paul Strand (1990-1976) was an American modernist photographer with a career spanning well over half a century. His work included the first intentionally made abstraction photographs, the first photograph of a part of a mechanical device as a purely aesthetic image, landscapes, architecture and candid portraits of everyday people. One of the most fascinating things about Strand is also the influence of artists like Picasso and Cézanne on what he was trying to achieve with his camera.

Reading Paul Strand: a Retrospective Monograph, the Years 1915-1946, published in 1971 as a hardcover, is something like dipping your big toe into a warm pool and then slowly submersing yourself further on every read through its pages. On first browse there appeared to be less to these images than I had imagined. However, Strand’s photography is deceptively simple, something very difficult to achieve. And it’s important to realise that these photographs were experiments and excursions in a two-dimensional visual world unlike our modern image-intensive iPhone enabled contemporary society. In that sense, it’s important to slow down and appreciate the black and white photographs for what they were in their context of time and space. In one sense, they are aesthetically beautiful images in their own right. In another, they represent the expression and evolution of artistic ideas.

Alfred Stieglitz thought enough of Paul Strand to include him in his Camera Work magazine in 1917 and exhibited Strand at 291, formerly known as Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, located on Fifth Avenue in New York. Stieglitz wrote:

New picture makers happen every day, not only in photography but also painting. New picture makers are notoriously nothing but imitators of the accepted: the best of them imitators of, possibly at one time, original workers… [Strand's] work is pure. It is direct. It does not rely on tricks of process.Alfred Stieglitz

This retrospective of Strand’s work from 1915- 1946 covers only half of his career as a photographer. However, from abstractions to portraits to landscapes there is a strong sense of discoverability within his photographs that compelled me read and re-read this book a half dozen times in succession. Strand was a master of drama in the understated… a man who pushed photography toward art… a creator of deceptively simple images – attributes that I definitely admire.

The important thing for photographers to take away from Paul Strand’s work is that our ideas and perspectives as “new picture makers” come from somewhere. In many cases, they can be traced back to Strand. When you take an aesthetic photograph of a printing press roller… when you break perspective with a fence… when you take abstract photographs of light on contrasting surfaces… there is Strand.

This is an important piece of knowledge for every photographer. Ideas are currency and it’s important to understand the economy of ideas if you hope one day to produce original ideas rather than just pretty pictures.

Carleton Watkins (1829-1916) travelled from New York State to California as a young man alongside his slightly older family friend Collis Huntington. After some time in the West, Watkins took up a temporary position in a daguerreotypy studio and from that moment had found his calling… he would be a photographer.

Watkins had a mammoth camera made by a cabinetmaker to take 18 inch by 22 inch glass negatives and headed on the long and arduous trek to Yosemite where he produced mammoth plate photographs that were received with some acclaim. Although, the best of these Yosemite photographs were produced in the 1860s, while in his 30s as a more accomplished expert in the field. He went on to record much of the development of the West Coast including the gold rush and the ever-expanding railroads.

Watkins also produced a large number of stereoscopic photographic views through his career using a stereo camera, popular in the mid-to-late 1800s, and employed techniques like panorama and ‘putting a framed photograph on a wall’ that were quite novel.

So why have you probably not heard of Carleton Watkins? After all, he was the photographic rival to Edweard Muybridge. His friend Collis Huntington was to be one of the big four Robber Barons of the 19th Century railroads alongside Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker.

The answer is probably that Carleton Watkins left little evidence of his thinking behind in written words to share for posterity.

But he was also, in the end, a victim of fate. On the morning of 18 April, 1906 Carleton Watkins woke to the San Francisco earthquake and a studio where a lifetime work lay in broken glass plates and burning business records. He was approaching 70 and had just arranged for his life’s work to be bought by Stanford University. The post-earthquake fire deleted that work like a blunt force trauma. A half century of work. Gone.

It wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s that interest in Watkins resurfaced. Remember, he took those Yosemite photographs some 80 years before Ansel Adams trod the timbers into that same park to create his iconic images.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art produced Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception by Douglas R. Nickel as an exhibition book. It not only covers Watkins mammoth plate photographs but includes a large number of other stereoscope, panorama and card photographs.

I think if you take the time to look at the work of Carleton Watkins you’ll be amazed at the quality and detail of those photographs. In the mid-to-late 1800s photography was barely out of its cage and Watkins produced what could be described as perfect landscapes. They were technical masterpieces. Created under extreme difficulty and carried home precariously on the backs of mules.

It makes clear that photography is a medium that started out with perfection and seems to have been met by compromises in every direction. They already had it back in the day, right there.

John Szarkowski (1925-2007) was Director of Photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art from 1962-1991 and during that period put together Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art. This collection of images, published in 1973, accounted for a mere one per cent of MOMAs photography collection including work from the mid 1800s through to the early 1970s.

Each photographer is only represented by a single photograph in this book regardless of their standing or the number of images acquired by MOMA. Also, each photograph is accompanied by a short essay written by Szarkowski on the adjacent page. Each photograph is a black and white. The accompanying essays range from a historic understanding of each image through to discussion about its conception, execution and interpretation that places it into a context beyond a mere picture on the wall. It is important to know who made a photograph, why they thought it was important and how it contributed to the spider-web lineage of photographic geneology.

Szarkowski goes to great lengths to explain another way of seeing photographs. As he reminds the reader, often photographs can misrepresent a situation as much by what is left out as what is included. So knowing a photograph is much more than standing in front of a wall and making a subjective thumbs-up or thumbs-down about aesthetic beauty. A photograph also changes in meaning over time as culture and society change around it.

For example, Robert Doisneau’s photograph At the Cafe, Chez Fraysse, Rue de Seine, Paris, 1958 on pages 172-173 depicts an older man and a younger woman at the bar with wine glasses in front of them. The man is leaning on the bar with his left elbow. The woman faces forward, only part way through her first glass. In Szarkowski’s 1973 interpretation of this photograph he writes of the power between a man and woman in a pseudo-sexual dance, of sorts. In fact, even I found this interpretation offensive given we are now in 2011. This photograph, 50+ years after being made and 40 years after Szarkowski’s interpretation, now reflects a dirty old man, very sleazy, pushing drinks on the young woman who is thinking – “How do I get out of this situation?”

I know that too often I see photographs, particularly in Internet communities that I avoid like the plague, merely judged on sharpness, technical expertise and aesthetic contribution. As an amateur photographer interested in another way of viewing the world I find that perspective slightly repugnant. Give me instead a meaningful moment to step inside the photographer’s mind.

By far my favourite aspect of this book (and why I will eventually acquire a copy for my bookshelf) are those essays that make Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art a perfect coffee table book. It’s so easy to pick it up and fall to a random photograph with a one to a three minute read. The value of this coffee table style seems to have been lost in recent years.

Because where else would I be more engrossed in all of this than laying on my sofa waiting for inspiration? This book is a gem.

Jeff Carter (1928-2010) left behind an archive of around 55,000 film negatives that spanned a 50 year career as he worked and travelled through the back-lots of Australia. His photographs are of ordinary working class Australians from the cities to the country and along the coastline. Jeff Carter’s letterhead read “photographer for the poor and unknown”, wrote Robert McFarlane in a Sydney Morning Herald obituary on November 6, 2010.

Jeff Carter was a writer and photojournalist with contributions to leading magazines like Women’s Weekly, Pix, People and National Geographic. For a time he was the editor of Outdoors and Fishing. He was also Australia’s best documentary photographer of his generation although there are more simple truths secreted in his photographs than mere cultural records of the day. There is humour, compassion and a hell of a lot of plain and ordinary beauty.

When you read Jeff Carter Retrospective from New Holland Publishers it’s hard not to think of that later iconic Australian with a camera, Rennie Ellis (1940-2003). Although it seems Carter chose the low road and Ellis the high; Carter the ordinary rural Australian and Ellis the contemporary rock stars and urban cultures of his era. Yet for their differences in social surroundings their photography shows a shared Australian documentary genus that seems to link them. Rennie Ellis’ No Standing Only Dancing reflects the bright lights and aspirations of another facet of Australian history and is well worth a read if you can find a copy.

Jeff Carter Retrospective includes a selection of photographs spanning from 1960 over the next 50 years and is split into five sections. ‘The Big Smoke’ looks at Australian urban life transitioning out of the 1950s into the 1960s. ‘Beach Culture’ records our cultural relationship with the expansive Australian coastline. ‘Properly True’ moves inland to the expansive hard country and the people who made it their home through the 1950s to the present day. ‘Men and Women of Australia’ are deceptively simple portraits of ordinary and extraordinary Australians. And ‘The Next Wave’ includes a selection of Australia’s children.

This book, first published in 2005, was republished for the Beach Bush and Battlers exhibition at State Library of New South Wales that was held in early 2011.

Bill Brandt (1904-1983) was a master photographer – a photojournalist, a documentary photographer, he shot portraits of famous identities, explored nudes through distortion and made some beautiful landscapes. Born in Hamburg to an English father and German mother, both with Russian blood in their veins, Brandt spent a number of years in a Swiss sanitorium recovering from tuberculosis. In his early twenties, having recovered, he left for Vienna where a social opportunity afforded him the chance to photograph Ezra Pound… who then introduced him to Man Ray. He moved to Paris and worked in Man Ray’s studio for three months.

At some point in the Paris experience Brandt decided to document life in England and it’s with that work that he opens Shadow of Light. The book is a selection by Bill Brandt of photographs across his career. His dark images of society at all class levels… the England now lost… conjures up a grubbier time. While several are gorgeous beyond their documentary intent, I am repeatedly drawn back to Brandt’s portraits and landscapes.

The portaits are interesting because of their dark contrast, sometimes surreal, often somewhat sinister – plate 77: J. B. Priestly and plate 95: Jaques Lartigue. There is a contemplative Franco Zeffirelli on pate 81 and a worried Pablo Picasso on plate 93. His portraiture style isn’t easily confused with other photographers. It is gritty, dark and bold. And some of the landscapes are simply inspiring works of art.

I should confess that my predilection for Brandt’s photography means I can’t give a non-biased opinion of his work or books. If you haven’t been exposed to Brandt’s photography you should open yourself to the experience. He had an incredible eye. He was also a master of that black and white, almost austerity, that I imagine when I look at scenes. It’s hard to describe. But it’s like a Brandt is darker than the darkest dark. It’s like he has coal under his fingernails. It’s like the surrealist in him opens another doorway to his eyes that changes the world in some almost fractional manner.

Andre Kertesz (1894-1985) was a master photographer born in Hungary. After serving in World War One he worked in an accounting office in Budapest until, in 1925, he followed his heart to Paris, the centre of the art world. In Paris, he quickly made friends friends with artists such as “Leger, Chagall, Vlaminck, Mondrian, Delaunay, Giacometti, Lipchitz, Lurcat, Calder and Zadkine”. And when he wasn’t shooting photographs or sleeping in his room… he hung out at Cafe Du Dome, the centre of their social universe. Kertesz described those 11 years in Paris as the best of his life. He had an international reputation and was greatly respected as an artist and photographer.

Kertesz left Paris for New York in 1936 with his wife for one year. However, the war erupted in Europe and he spent the next 30 years being ignored, under-appreciated and mostly shooting photographs to please himself because the American market was not ready for his European style. They called his nude distortions ‘pornography’ and in turn he refused to buckle under on commercial projects. It was not until Kertesz was an old man that America accepted him as a master photographer.

In the book Kertesz on Kertesz: a Self-Portrait, published in 1985, Kertesz walks the reader through his life story in a personal way using photographs and small pieces of text to guide context. It could have as easily been called “A Conversation with Kertesz” because he reminisces about photographs along the journey.

For example, four friends in World War One were photographed on a communal latrine but one of those men was killed soon after. Yet this was the only photograph Kertesz had to hand the man’s wife, and he did just that. She was pleased. On another occasion a simple photograph of a young soldier writing a letter gets the explanation that this soldier was writing about jumping over a brothel wall on Christmas, 1914. The photograph is elevated by the story.

There is a beautiful photograph on page 28 titled “Hungary, 1918″ that is beautifully framed. At first you see the cobbled alleyway and the peasant woman. Then the ladder. Then you see the cat climbing a ladder right at the top left intersection of thirds.

You can see the positive outlook of his photographs in Paris – chairs on the Champs Elysees; the famous image of four men in business suits walking across a wet Paris street; friends including the sculptor Alexander Calder, Marc and Bella Chagall and Piet Mondrian. I read the book through and studied each photograph at least three times before putting it aside.

Yet, my favourite photograph by far is on page 98 “Self-portrait with life masks, New York, 1976.” He writes,

These life masks were made in 1928, I think. One day I found one broken, and so I took them to a sculptor to fix. He knew my Distortions and so he made the heads like them. One day I came home and there they were. I set up my camera and asked a friend to push the button. Andres Kertesz

‘Kertesz on Kertesz: a Self-Portrait’ is an interesting book to review because what I really want you to do is to go to a library and find a copy. Read it. Immerse yourself into the soul of this artist who contributed a significant legacy to photography. He wrote, of one image of a Paris street taken in 1928 “I think Atget or Berenice Abbott did this street. But not with the cat.”

I hadn’t realised what an interesting man in real life Kertesz had been. It left me with a desire to learn more. It made me appreciate his real message for photographers and artists… work for yourself to your own vision of the world. Even when your friends and peers tell you that you’re crazy.