Streetsroll

Mark Cohen

Andrii Mur — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 14:53:38 GMT

American photographer (born in Wilkes-Barre,
Pennsylvania on Aug. 24, 1943)
Street photography and color pioneer (best known for
innovative close-up b&w works of the 1970s)
He lived and photographed in his home-town Wilkers-Barre
for the most of his life.
Owned a camera since he was a child and worked in his own basement darkroom at 14.
In 1969, first exposition in a group exhibition at George Eastman House.
In 1973, came to prominence with his first solo exhibition at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1971 and 1976 and received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1975.
Often made “grab shots” without looking into viewfinder, invaded in space uncomfortably close, flashed his subjects, cropped bodies, faces and other parts of the scene out in order to focus on certain aspects of the person or to bring that raw, frantic, gritty, almost hallucinatory mood.
Inspired and realised he’d found his calling in photography
after a high-school encounter with “The Decisive Moment” book.
Influenced Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus...
Leica camera with wide lenses 21/28/35mm and flash, lately 50mm.
Cohen left Wilkes-Barre in 2013 and moved to Philadelphia, where he continues to shoot photography with the same focus he did in his hometown...

“My pictures are not like Cartier-Bresson, although he was a tremendous influence. It took me a while to think, ‘It’s okay to take flash-pictures.’ Then I figured out a technique where I work inside this very short zone with a small flash.”

Especially good one, it describes how genuine and honest he was:

"The galleries thought that my pictures were strong. I got good reviews, but they never sold many. But that was okay. It’s still hard to sell them. For instance, I sold the headless horseman picture to somebody and he brought it back because it frightened his wife."

“I come in a bit closer. So it’s not a play; it’s a macro-play that I’m dealing with. It’s a macro-play that I create with my own intrusion into the scene…”
– Mark Cohen

“The whole country is my studio. I used to go work under a certain bridge if it was pouring, because people used to hide there from the rain. If it was a cloudy day, I would go to a different place. So I used these neighborhoods like a set. And I still use them like that. There are certain places I know that, if I go there in the evening– I like to take pictures at dusk– they will have a certain flavor even today.”

“It sets up a formal look, or what I think of a formal value in the picture where your subject is highlighted and the background is dark. But the main reason I used flash was that it gives you a zone from 2 to 8 feet and you don’t have to focus, and you don’t have to worry about the subject being blurred either, because the flash is a thousandth of a second. So, you get very sharp and clear pictures of your subject.”

“I just made my photos in Wilkes-Barre and a few other places because I wasn’t the kind of photographer who liked to, or needed to, travel around the world… I work on an extremely narrow range, in terms of my method and technical issues, too. It’s what is in my head that has developed over time. So I’ve just kept taking pictures in the same two counties.”

“I became a surrealist because I kept walking around the same blocks, and I started taking a picture of a guy’s shoe. I didn’t know what I was doing exactly. I was just being led by whatever I would see.” – Mark Cohen

“Well, I was making art so I suppose I had license. That’s how I felt. Nobody was getting assaulted really; nobody was getting hurt. The intrusion was to make something much more exciting and new than sneaking a picture on a subway, like those buttonhole Walker Evans pictures or the Helen Levitt pictures. This is a whole different level of observation.”

“A lot of this is mood driven, but I don’t exactly know where the motive and inspiration to take pictures comes from. So it’s very spontaneous work; there’s not a lot really to plan.”

"In the early seventies I was making pictures with 21 and 28mm lenses that just enlarged the depth of field incredibly, and the little flash would carry out 3 to 5 feet. So in that small space, like in the knee picture or the bubble gum picture, I’m only a foot or two away from these people. And I learned to hold the camera very levels the pictures didn’t look like wild wide-angle pictures"

“My pictures are not about Wilkes-Barre. They’re about an artist who is making pictures without a define emotive. There is nevertheless something sociological. You see broken fences. You don’t see any swimming pools and they don’t have any L.A. glamour about them. We’re on the underside of town. I was trying to do Grim Street without our saying “Wilkes-Barre” throughout the whole book if I could get away with that. This is about something else.“

“I’m in my backyard making these. The whole country is my studio. I used to go work under a certain bridge if it was pouring, because people used to hide there from the rain. If it was a cloudy day, I would go to a different place. So I used these neighborhoods like a set. And I still use them like that. There are certain places I know that, if I go there in the evening– I like to take pictures at dusk– they will have a certain flavor even today.”
– Mark Cohen

“When you feel like you’re making pictures– the most important is to make new pictures. The pictures you already took– you already took those pictures. My main drive is to do something new– to make some new kind of picture.”
– Mark Cohen

"Certain themes run thought the work all the time and it does become some kind of social psychological document about my vision about what i look at and how i respond in the environment."
— Mark Cohen

"They're not easy pictures. But I guess that's why they're mine."
– Mark Cohen

“If you keep photographing in the same place, you start to find out something about yourself.“ – Mark Cohen

P.S. I produce content for free and without any advertisement. If you share same love to photography, buy me a free roll of Tri-X film to photograph on

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Books

“I’m making pictures in this one area. But there are these odd, eerie impulses, maybe from a lot of unconscious regions, influencing how I select people. And that’s why the book is called Grim Street.”

“I’ve wanted to make a book for a long time. I made two hundred of the glossy reproduction prints and then eventually cut them in half. So, in this unconscious, uncurated way I put together what I basically think is my best work. They’re going in the book chronologically, because they all have dates on them. I don’t know exactly how it’s going to come out, but I think it’s going to be pretty good.” – Mark Cohen on "Grim Street"

"Grim Street" by Mark Cohen

"Dark Knees" by Vince Aletti & Mark Cohen

"Frame: A Retrospective" by Mark Cohen

@seeAlso

Stephen Shore

Andrii Mur — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 15:07:39 GMT

American photographer (born in New York on Oct. 8, 1947)
Colour pioneer (mostly known for vernacular scenes of USA)
His visual language is distinguishable by the manner of refining the ordinary and banal into artistic form.
Received a darkroom kit at the age of six from his uncle.
At the age of 10, neighbour (music publisher) gave him Walker Evans book.
While he was 14, the Museum of Modern Art acquired his prints under the leadership of Edward Steichen, who bought 3 of his pictures when Stephen contacted him.
In the mid-60s photographed Andy Warhol’s Factory with its habitués, from Lou Reed and Nico to Marcel Duchamp, for about 3 years.
Andy Warhol’s Factory and seeing Artists making aesthetic decisions influenced his Pop Art and Conceptual Art ideas.
In the 1970s and ‘80s, Shore embarked on a series of coast-to-coast road trips through the United States, The resulting series, American Surfaces (1972) and Uncommon Places (1973-1982), established Shore’s mastery of unexplored directions in color and subject matter and are seminal contributions to the history of photography.
In 1971, at the age of 23, he earned the distinction of becoming the first living photographer since Alfred Stieglitz to receive a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In 1982 his book, "Uncommon Places" became a bible for young photographers seeking to work in color
Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth have acknowledged his work as inspiration.
Shore is a fan of Garry Winogrand’s work.
Has had one-man shows at Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; George Eastman House, Rochester; Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and Art Institute of Chicago and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts...
Kodacolor negative films & Chromogenic color prints mostly
Nikons, Leica M3, Deardorff 4X5 & 8X10 Large Format film cameras, phone, Hasselblad X1D...

"When I was 17, I met Andy Warhol and asked if I could come to his studio to photograph. And as soon as I went there, I realized that that was more interesting than going to high school."

"Don't be upset about the things you have no control of"
– Stephen Shore

"My idea was to keep the visual diary of meal I ate, people I met, televisions I watched, motel rooms I slept, toilets I used. As well as the towns I would drive through. And through this visual diary and series of repeated subject build kind of cultural picture of the country at the time."

"One thing I wanted to do was take pictures that felt like they were not burdened with visual conventions"

"I wanted to take pictures that felt like seeing."

"And I wanted pictures that felt as natural as speaking.. What was the experience of looking like."

In "Uncommon Places" I'm often relying on descriptive power of the camera to make a complex picture that the viewer moves their attention through. So what I'm doing is creating the small world for a viewer to explore, rather than the impression of what it's like to look through my eyes.

"I'm interested into formal concerns. About how to convert the experience of a complex 3Dimentional space into flat bounded medium. But at the same time I'm looking at the cultural exploration..."

"One thing that I've noticed uising the view camera. Because the images are so higly detailed, there are little things in the picture that I can see that I don't have to make the subject of the picture."

"I was attracted to very crisp bright light days, because that light I felt communicated the experience of Clarity."

"Whenever I find that I begin to repeat myself I look ahead in a new Direction"
– Stephen Shore

"Sometimes it is changing location, changing the subject metter. And sometimes it's change in form of the work and taking advantage of possibilities that might not have existed before."

"In Israel and the West bank I wanted to both convey the presense of the conflict but also convey a sense of the land and a daily life."

Shore documents the last living Holocaust survivors scattered across Ukrainian towns..

“Why can’t a photograph be all four things at once? -be an art object; be a document, what ever that means exactly, but deal with content; be a formalist exploration; and operate on some, metaphor is not the right word but, resonant level...”
— Stephen Shore

“To see something spectacular and recognise it as a photographic possibility is not making a very big leap. But to see something ordinary, something you’d see every day, and recognize it as a photographic possibility – that is what I am interested in.”
– Stephen Shore

P.S. I produce content for free and without any advertisement. If you share same love to photography, buy me a free roll of film to photograph on

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Books

"Uncommon Places came about because I had a show in ’76 at MoMA and he [Ansel Adams] saw it and came back with his editor at New York Graphic Society, named Tim Hill, and suggested they do a book. That’s how Uncommon Places happened."

"Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places: The Complete Works" by Stephen Shore

"Stephen Shore: Selected Works, 1973-1981" by Stephen Shore

"Transparencies: Small Camera Works 1971-1979" by Stephen Shore

"The Nature of Photographs" by Stephen Shore

@seeAlso

Saul Leiter

Andrii Mur — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 20:35:32 GMT

American photographer and abstract expressionist painter with the good sense of humor, who lived in New York.
(born in Pittsburgh on Dec. 3 1923, moved to NYC in 1946, in 1950s stretched the boundaries of photography, died in NYC on Nov. 26 2013)
Colour pioneer (mostly known for New York early colour of 1950s-60s)
His visual language is distinguishable by unconventional sense of form and fragmentation, ambiguity and contingency, expressed with improwithational use of suble colours and tones.
In 1953 Edward Steichen included Leiter's 23 black and white photographs to MoMA exhibition, “Always the Young Stranger”, in 1957 Steichen included 20 colour images in MoMA conference “Experimental Photography in Color.”
In the late 1950s, the art director Henry Wolf published Leiter's color fashion work in "Esquire" and later in "Harper's Bazaar".
Leiter continued to work as fashion photographer through the 1970s...
A painter, knew Duchamp, admired works of Bonnard, Matisse, Degas...
His friendship with abstract expressionist painter Pousette-Dart and soon after, with W. Eugene Smith, expanded his interest in photography.
Gelatin silver prints, Chromogenic prints, Fujicolor archival prints...
Switched to digital photography in his late works
Leiter’s work experienced a surge of popularity after a monograph,
"Early Color", was published by Steidl in 2006...
Saul Leiter continued to paint and photograph through the end of his Life.

Leiter’s work is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Victoria and Albert Museum, London and many other public and private collections. Leiter was the subject of an award-winning documentary by Tomas Leach, titled “In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter” (2012)

“There’s a certain kind of charm and comfort in disorder that not everyone appreciates” — Saul Leiter

"I didn't think it's enough to be sincere. I think that you have to be sincere about something worth being sincere" — Saul Leiter

“I spent a great deal of my life being ignored. I was always very happy that way. Being ignored is a great privilege. That is how I think I learnt to see what others do not see and to react to situations differently. I simply looked at the world, not really prepared for anything.” — Saul Leiter

"I must admit that I am not a member of the ugly school. I have a great regard for certain notions of beauty even though to some it is an old fashioned idea. Some photographers think that by taking pictures of human misery, they are addressing a serious problem. I do not think that misery is more profound than happiness." — Saul Leiter

"I think the search for beauty is a very valid occupation and preoccupation. I don't feel anyone should appologize for Mattisse's paintings I don't thing that those areas of Art that strive for beauty need to be questioned." — Saul Leiter

P.S. As a Visual Enthusiast I keep it running by my personal time & costs.
Any contribution helps to retain this content Alive.

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"There is nothing you can do when someone looks on your work and forms certain conclusion" — Saul Leiter

"NO. Someone doesn't pick you up, you pick yourself up, you pick yourself up"
— Saul Leiter

Books

"Saul Leiter" by Kehrer Verlag

"Saul Leiter: Early Color" by Martin Harrison

"Saul Leiter: Early Black and White" by Martin Harrison

"Saul Leiter: In My Room" by Saul Leiter

@seeAlso

Ernst Haas

Andrii Mur — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 17:31:37 GMT

Austrian-American photographer who lived in New York
(born in Vienna on March 2, 1921, began working at Magnum in 1949 and settled in New York in 1951, received the Hasselblad award in 1986, died on September 12, 1986 in NYC)
Early B&W reportage works of returning prisoners in post-war Vienna brought attention of LIFE magazine
At the invitation of Robert Capa, Haas joined Magnum developing close associations with Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Werner Bishof
Colour pioneer (In 1953 LIFE magazine published his groundbreaking 24-page color photo essay on New York City; In 1962 a retrospective of his work was the first fully color photography exhibition held at MoMA)
Used Kodachrome film
Altered perception through his use of colour, close-ups and off-center compositions, chiaroscuro, out of focus effects, reflection, superposition and motion blurs. As a painter Haas increasingly favoured the motif of the image within the image, distinctive use of colours and abstract forms!
Dye-transfer and chromogenic prints

“There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.”
– Ernst Haas

“No photographer has worked more successfully to express the sheer physical joy of seeing.”
– John Szarkowski

"I am not interested in shooting new things - I am interested to see things new." – Ernst Haas

“Best wide-angle lens? Two steps backward. Look for the ‘ah-ha’.”
– Ernst Haas

“Only a vision – that is what one must have.” – Ernst Haas

“The best pictures differentiate themselves by nuances… a tiny
relationship – either a harmony or a disharmony – that creates a picture.”
— Ernst Haas

"In every artist there is poetry. In every human being there is the poetic element. We know, we feel, we believe."
– Ernst Haas

“We can write the new chapters in a visual language whose prose and poetry will need no translation.”
– Ernst Haas

"Style has no formula, but it has a secret key. It is the extension of your personality."
– Ernst Haas

"You don’t take pictures, the good ones happen to you."
– Ernst Haas

"A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it?"
– Ernst Haas

"Bored with obvious reality, I find my fascination in transforming it into a subjective point of view. Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself - less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive - less prose, more poetry."
– Ernst Haas

P.S. As a Visual Enthusiast I keep it running by my personal time & costs.
Any contribution helps to retain this content Alive.

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“Every work of art has its necessity; find out your very own. Ask yourself if you would do it if nobody would ever see it, if you would never be compensated for it, if nobody ever wanted it. If you come to a clear ‘yes’ in spite of it, then go ahead and don’t doubt it anymore.”
– Ernst Haas

Books

"Ernst Haas: Color Correction" by William A Ewing

@seeAlso

Fred Herzog

Andrii Mur — Tue, 29 Oct 2019 11:10:30 GMT

Photographer who lived in Canada
(born in Bad Friedrichshall, southern Germany, on September 21, 1930 – came to Vancouver in 1953 – died September 9, 2019)
Colour pioneer (known for colours of Vancouver's life in 1950s and '60s)
Used Kodachrome film slides
Was employed as a medical photographer by day, and on evenings and weekends he took his camera to the streets, documenting daily life as he observed it
Focused his camera on storefronts, neon signs, billboards, cafes and crowds of people, he eloquently depicted the architecture of the street as a framework for human interaction, presenting a view of the city that is both critical and elegiac
Admired works of Walker Evans, August Sander, Eugène Atget and Robert Frank...
Switched to digital photography in his late works

“What’s miraculous about the whole thing is that when I started taking photographs in that style in 1957 — in colour — there was nobody that I could copy. Nobody.”
– Fred Herzog (talking to Georgia Straight in 2011)

Note: Herzog was an earlier pioneer of colour photography than more famous colour photographers like William Eggleston or Stephen Shore.

“I loved the city for its grittiness. I wasn’t a journalist. I did not have the chance to become that. But I photographed like I was a journalist the scene that was Vancouver.”

“In those days we were convivial. That means we can live together. That has gone away. We are no longer convivial. We’re ‘You’re better than me,’ and ‘I’m better than him,’ and ‘I’m going to kick butt on him.'”

“That was the best barber shop of all times. It was also the first [photo I took]. I couldn’t improve on it. Look at this, it’s almost like a Hollywood movie set, it’s beyond belief.”

“The thing that street photographers hope to discover has to do with the disorderly vitality of the street; the street people on the corners and plazas, in billiard parlours, pubs and stores, where shoppers, voyeurs and loiterers feel at home.”

“The neon signs and the soft drink signs, the cigarette ads and the billboards and the posters and the grafitti and collages of torn-off posters, all that contributes to make the city a place where art actually happens.”
– Fred Herzog

“When people see you, the picture’s gone for good,”

“The jackpot is for 25 cents. Look at the size of the coin. You’d think she had won 250 grand. But there’s five cents, and there’s five cents and there’s 10 cents. It’s not big money.”

“I loved the docks, the airport, the street, the people,”

“Signs in this context expressed the vitality of a city. You notice that now the city has no signs, the vitality is no longer visible"

“Timing in photography is almost everything. You have to pay attention to where the light comes from, you have to pay attention to your background.”

That’s a treasure now, to see a picture like that. Not to have the damn thing around and catch mice at night, but to have a picture of that, because that is how the city looked in those days."

“New, clean, safe and honest neighborhoods do not give rise to interesting pictures”

“I was aware I was taking art. That’s the conceit of young people. I knew that what I am doing is not only unique, but that someday I’m going to unpack that and shock people with it. And that was 50 years ago. It’s sort of a fairy tale story, but that’s exactly how it’s beginning to play out.”

“Isn’t that lovely, the train coming, the car crossing just in time. I knew two people who died [in train/car crashes], two good acquaintances of mine, one a friend. I was in the fire department [in Germany] and our fire chief got killed just like that. Not in Vancouver, in my hometown in Germany."

“I have 80,000 slides. I don’t have them all anymore. Furthermore many of these slides don’t play in this kind of thing. They were done for very different reasons. I’ve got lots of pictures of motorcycle races and of butterflies and God knows what else. I’ve made 28,000 negatives. I counted them, I figured it out, per page of 36 exposures."

"There is a saying about seeing: Only a few people can see but most people don’t even look. And that says a lot to me. You can only see if you have something in your mind to bring to the picture. The camera is just the least important adjunct to your ideas. Your observations are important because they’re you."
— Fred Herzog

P.S. As a Visual Enthusiast I keep it running by my personal costs.
Any contribution helps to retain this content Alive.

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Books

"Fred Herzog" by David Campany

@seeAlso

Edward Hopper

Andrii Mur — Mon, 14 Oct 2019 12:17:40 GMT

American realist painter.
(born in July 22, 1882 in Upper Nyack, New York – died in his studio near Washington Square in New York City on May 15, 1967).
Known for aesthetics of alienation. The sense of isolation.
Was initially trained as a commercial illustrator,
attended New York School of Art (1900 – 1906).
Considered himself an Impressionist,
was fascinated by American vernacular architecture.
Discovered the works of Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Manet, Renoir,
Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, Monet, Cezanne
and Van Gogh...
Gained his first financial success from prinmaking by Etching. ^[1]
Was a celebrated poster artist during the First World War.
Had his first one-man show at the age of 37
(January 1920 at the Whitney Studio Club)
In 1930 his painting House by the Railroad was the first work to be acquired for the collections of Museum of Modern Art.

After New York School of Art Hopper stayed in Paris (1906 – 1907).
Then he undertook trips to Amsterdam, London, Brussels, Berlin, Madrid, and Toledo, which helped to shape his visual vocabulary.

Alfred Hitchcock modeled the famous house in Pyscho (1960) off of Hopper’s House by the Railroad.

"I have tried to present my sensations in what is the most congenial and impressive form possible to me.”
– Edward Hopper

“I do not believe there is another city on earth so beautiful as Paris nor another people with such an appreciation of the beautiful as the French.”
– Edward Hopper

"No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.”
– Edward Hopper

“Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world. ”
– Edward Hopper

“Sometimes talking to Eddie is just like dropping a stone in a well, except that it doesn’t thump when it hits bottom.”
— Jo Hopper, his wife

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“When I don’t feel in the mood for painting, I go to the movies for a week or more.”
— Edward Hopper

Edward's wife Josephine Nivison was his favorite model and was largely responsible for his initial success. At her recommendation, the curators at the Brooklyn Museum agreed to show six of Hopper’s watercolors...

Hopper carried a quote from Goethe in his wallet:

“The beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, recreated, molded and reconstructed in a personal form and an original manner.”
– Goethe

Due to realism, contemplation of ordinary subjects and study of the psyche Hopper became a signinficant inspiration for contemporary photographers. We could find clear references to him in photographs of Gregory Crewdson, Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, William Eggleston, Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Stephen Shore, Nan Goldin, and many many others.

Etching – the process of using strong acid to cut into the
unprotected parts of a metal surface to create a design in intaglio
(image is created by cutting, carving or engraving into a flat
surface) in the metal. As an intaglio method of printmaking it is,
along with engraving, the most important technique for old master
prints, and remains widely used today. ↩︎

William Eggleston Vol.2

Andrii Mur — Fri, 30 Aug 2019 17:15:40 GMT

William Eggleston

Below is the second selection of the photographs by William Eggleston. This time I've spiced it up with some music related to the decay of that time. Many of those bands used Eggleston photographs on the cover. Some particular songs Eggleston listened himself and some were added just because of corresponding mood. Enjoy!

If you've missed the 1st part, leave the music On - the main selection is here:

William Eggleston Profile

Movies for Photographers Vol. 2 (Cinematography 1980s, 1990s)

Andrii Mur — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 16:00:25 GMT

Once I've borrowed projector from the friend ...^_^

I have selected more than 90 movies with the great Cinematography work that deserves attention of any visual Enthusiast. Here is the 2nd Volume of my List.

L.A. Confidential (1997) - Curtis Hanson

Cinematographer - Dante Spinotti
Timeless Neo-Noir film. With the psychology interplays and dark scenes.

I tried to compose shots as if I were using a still camera. I was constantly asking myself, ‘Where would I be if I was holding a Leica?’
– Dante Spinotti

Spinotti quickly understood Hanson wanted neither the traditional “nostalgic haze” frequently relied on upon films to suggest the period nor the clichéd smoke and diffusion of film-noir visuals so often used in urban crime stories. As Hanson eloquently put it, he wanted the “Light of Los Angeles.”

Hanson and Spinotti were influenced by Robert Frank's 1958 book The Americans, which resonates in almost every aspect of the film’s look, from practical lighting and camera angles to the selection of locations.

Departed from classic Noir, Spinotti took advantage of the city’s natural light and worked on interior locations with practical light, spiced it with the occasional appearance of menacing, reflections, exaggerated shadows and surrounding darkness.

I like to shoot dark images. I’m drawn to the mystery of darkness with brightness in the center; that's instinctive to me.
– Dante Spinotti

Se7en (1995) - David Fincher

Cinematographer - Darius Khondji
Iconic Dark rainy thriller with the spectacular light and bizarre details.

Shot on film with the special colour process. By pushing his stock by a stop, using a re-silvering process occasionally flashing, Khondji dramatically deepened the blacks and saturated the remaining colours.

“I saw these crimes as the work of an artist,” the cinematographer says, “like the work of German artist Joseph Beuys, who was the father of modern conceptual art. This serial killer will create scenes of murder with different lighting, decorations, words written on the walls or floor in blood — very weird. You are led into a world of images by the killer, suggested by the Seven Deadly Sins. That’s important to understand as you see the different lighting atmospheres in the movie.”

For Seven Khondji found inspiration while walking the nighttime streets of Manhattan.

The moisture, the colors, the water, everything felt right for the movie — even though it was to be made in Los Angeles, and I didn’t even know if I would be shooting it yet.
– Darius Khondji

Many Darius’s inspiration also came from The Americans book by Robert Frank.

One of the first books I brought with me was The Americans by Robert Frank,” says Khondji. “It became a bible for me. It’s all black-and-white, but the photos have the spirit of modernity. You feel the dynamic in Frank’s photography — which also helped me decide on the Primo lenses. The Panavision system is great, but I wanted the Primos which I knew would give me that same feeling. So we shot the movie on Primo lenses in Super 35.
– Darius Khondji

The neverending rain in the movie symbolizes the constant and overwhelming thought currents.

The darkness and the dull green-yellow colour palette with the high contrast create the mood of decay, roughness and angst. Whereas the deep reds and blacks symbolized the origin of darkness in the killer's house. The almost monochromatic reds with greens in the warehouse gave that a kind of Hamburg violent look.

Darius has used many practicals and some smoke to bring the natural look to the movie.

I love to see the origins of light within a shot, so source lighting is one of the main techniques we used.
– Darius Khondji

Khondji often puts the subject into the Darkness with backlight. Surrounded by the different layers for depth in back or for isolation in front. In his indoors scenes we see the interplay between the cold backlights and soft warm fill lights from the sides or from the top.

Then we would use Kino Flos as a backlight — a very soft line of light — and Chinese lanterns as top light, our key light. We used that combination often, with one and a half stops to two and a half stops difference between the key and fill.
– Darius Khondji

Darius also says that he was inspired from “The White Rose” by D.W Griffith where the outdoors were brightly lit and indoors had this moody feel where the source was simulated while being in the frame, like they were lit from a flame far away, just like a painting.

Fallen Angels (1995) - Kar-Wai Wong

Cinematographer - Christopher Doyle
Beutifully drunk cinematic aesthetic of alienation and longing in vivid colours.

The movie is full of Wong’s stylistic signatures like exaggerated neon-tinted lighting, the use of music grooves to underscore moods, and pixillated slow-motion action scenes.

I wanted to use Massive Attack’s music, but it was too expensive, so I asked my composer in Hong Kong to do something like Massive Attack.
– Wong Kar-Wai

Gracefully violating the classical storytelling rules movie tells two interlocking stories filled with digressions and jumps in time. Spiced with voiceovers it often emphasizes characters thoughts with narration.

In Chinese there is a term which is very difficult to translate into English, it is something like “chances.” It means: Why am I sitting here having this interview with you instead of somebody else? Why should we meet here? This is about chances, and I think all my films are about chances.
– Wong Kar-Wai

Having small timeframe after two years of working on Ashes of Time, Kar-Wai took on a low budget film Chungking Express to make himself feel comfortable about making films again. He was so enthusiastic that the Chungking Express was finished in 6 weeks and the third part of it would become Fallen Angels connected like the "night and day of Hong Kong".

To me Chungking Express and Fallen Angels are one film that should be three hours long.
– Wong Kar-Wai

Cinematography by Christopher Doyle is groundbreaking as always.

We fucked up with the film stock. It was old. We couldn’t re-shoot…so of course it was foggy in color. We said: “maybe this can represent something so let’s pick some other pieces,” and that’s what we did. Because of a mistake, a certain structure came out of the film and you can write a PhD about it if you want. What happened was that we gave it a system, so we made the most important parts of each scene in black-and-white. But that was a solution to the problem, not an original concept. We just appropriated the mistake and made it work. It’s a more intuitive, open, or, maybe, Asian way of working.
– Christopher Doyle

Pulp Fiction (1994) - Quentin Tarantino

Cinematographer - Andrzej Sekula
Classics. Stylish tribute to crime and pop-culture, rich with narrative and clever storytelling.

Most of us have seen Pulp Fiction as it is one of the definitive 90’s films and the film itself played a significant role in defining the 90’s with its trends.

[gun shooting is heard]
I’m sorry, did I break your concentration?

With the financial backing of Miramax producers Harvey and Bob Weinstein (as well as a continuing collaboration with RESERVOIR DOGS producer Lawrence Bender), PULP FICTION jumps leagues beyond Tarantino’s debut in terms of visual presentation. Retaining the services of cinematographer Andrzej Sekula, Tarantino opts to shoot on 35mm film in the anamorphic 2.35:1 aspect ratio. This makes for bold, frequently-wide compositions that highlight the characters amidst the dried-out San Fernando Valley landscape. Tarantino and Sekula cultivate a color palette that’s reminiscent of aged Technicolor—creamy highlights, slightly washed out primaries and slightly-muddled contrast. The result is a burnt-out rockabilly aesthetic that jives with Tarantino’s Elvis-inspired, anachronistic visual style.

[uncomfortable silence]
Why do we feel it’s necessary to yak about bullshit in order to be comfortable?

Andrzej Sekuła played around a lot with both conventional and unconventional framing and composition. He also ensures that he does not break the 180-degree system, crossing over the axis of action in the movie. This is so that the relative positions of the characters in the frame remain consistent and that we as the audience do not feel disorientated.

Any time of the day is a good time for pie.

Having increased budget Tarantino goes all-out with a dynamic camera that bobs and weaves as it follows its subjects with enthusiasm for long tracking shots.

The cherry on top was using an old filmmaking Rear projection technique from the days before green screen. Brilliant idea with black and white rear projection, while the actors were rendered in full colour added vintage flair to the film’s look.

It’s the little differences. I mean they got the same shit over there that they got here, but it’s just — it’s just there it’s a little different.
– Vincent Vega

The warm vintage sound oftentimes sourced from the vinyl itself with its hiss, cracks, and all perfectly complemented the use of various pop, rock and soul tracks.

I admire Tarantino’s signature razor-sharp wit, nonlinear timeline, long-drawn-out dialogues, quirks and sense of “movie-ness” — everything is believable, yet just a little larger than life.

For my two films my head cameraman, Andrzej Sekula, and I used 50 AMC film which has the slowest emulsion there is. It requires a huge amount of light, but it’s not the least bit grainy and the image is as clear as crystal. I’m happiest with the results in Pulp Fiction. The colors are so bright they jump right out at you!
– Quentin Tarantino

Schindler's List (1993) - Steven Spielberg

Cinematographer - Janusz Kaminski
Black and white masterpiece with the cherry on top.

Kaminski shot most of the film on black-and-white emulsion. The sequences with the little girl in the red coat were shot in color emulsion and then painstakingly desaturated in a process called rotoscoping, which Kaminski describes as “an old version of CGI, except each frame was done by hand.

But the true signature of Spielberg and Kaminski collaboration is heavy backlight to create tension and atmosphere.

You get criticism for that kind of lighting and you get prizes for that kind of lighting, Some people say, ‘Enough of this, move on,’ but I like it! Light is life, and for me, the presence of light is essential…. I love backlight not just for the sake of glamorizing [the subject], but because the direction of the light can represent storytelling. I don’t do backlights and then also add key lights and all these things — if I do backlight, I want to see that backlight. That’s my style, and that’s the way we’ve done it in every single movie.
– Janusz Kaminski

The composition with its various juxtapositions and layering is also exceptional in the movie. I can not miss the various use of windows and natural as well.

You work in metaphors through lights and composition, and the worst thing for me is to see a movie that doesn’t have that. You see a cinematographer’s work and there are no visual metaphors, or they are so afraid to create a style that it just becomes this nothing.
– Janusz Kaminski

Barton Fink (1991) - Coen brothers

Cinematographer - Roger Deakins
Storyboarder - J. Todd Anderson
Assistant Editor - Michael Barenbaum
Comedic Noir film with a great visual style which splits and submerges the reality and imagination through the colour and composition.

It seemed important to us to create a feeling of isolation. Our strategy was to establish from the very beginning that the main character was experiencing a sense of dislocation.
– Joel Coen

It is one of the conventions of the classic crime film to lay out false trails as long as possible for the viewer. That said, our intention was to keep the ambiguity right to the end of the film.
– Joel Coen

...Barton Fink does not belong to any genre, but it does belong to a series, certainly one that Roman Polanski originated.

We used a lot of greens and yellows to suggest an aura of putrefaction.
– Etan Coen

Delicatessen (1991) - Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Cinematographer - Darius Khondji
Absurd fairy-tale with the vivid colours, green tones and beautiful composition.

Shot on Film with a special colour process.

On the very technical side of any film, the most important thing to me is to control a stock’s contrast, or gamma curve,” Khondji explains. “I usually shoot on Kodak, and when you ask for 48 or 47, you get a certain latitude, a certain curve. So I like to change that curve according to the tone of the story, or even to play with it from scene to scene.
– Darius Khondji

To that end, he began using a non-bleaching process in his color work, leading to further experimentation with a silver process that called for his stock to be run first through color baths and then re-souped as black-and-white, restoring silver to the negative and resulting in rich blacks while simultaneously desaturating colors. Delicatessen was his first feature to benefit from this procedure. “The directors wanted very contrasty images — something that would put color into the world of realism poetique, a current of the French cinema of the 1930s and ’40s which was very expressionistic,” Khondji remembers. “So I had to increase the contrast beyond what I could get from lighting.” As the blacks were so deepened by the silver process, Khondji would first use the Arriflex VariCon system to add detail in the shadows, while at the same time pushing the negative a stop to saturate the remaining colors as much as possible. “We put more color back in at every step we could, while at the same time getting these strong blacks — like ink,” he says.

Also, for the first time I used Chinese lanterns on a feature, – he adds.
When I was a child I had a huge paper lantern in my bedroom, which I loved. So I asked the gaffer on Delicatessen to find us some, which we used on dimmers. I thought I had invented something until someone said to me, "Interesting that you use the same techniques as Phillipe Rousselot!" I knew I hadn’t invested anything else, but I thought for sure the lanterns were mine!
– Darius Khondji

Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (1988) - Giuseppe Tornatore

Cinematographer - Blasco Giurato
Music Composer - Ennio Morricone
Poetic movie about the power of dreams and Love to Cinematography.

Few films in history have articulated so simply and so poetically what it’s like to have a love affair with the movies.

From the age of about 7 to 26, I would see at least one movie per day in a theater. That was a time when you could see a new film by a master like Fellini, a giallo by someone like Dario Argento, or a B-movie exploitation piece of shit, but I learned something from them all.

‘See everything!’ If you just see the sort of movies that you think you will like, your sensibility will be very narrow.
– Giuseppe Tornatore

After the closing of one of the oldest theatres where Giuseppe Tornatore was being involved in as the projectionist, he always wanted to take that atmosphere and put it into a story. During the next ten years, Tornatore made notes on it and interviewed many of the old projectionists for their stories, then he wrote the script.

After I finished my first film, my producer said to me “Don’t you have a passion project? Something you’re dying to make?” And I told him the entire story of Cinema Paradiso, right there. He was so touched that I decided to make it as my second movie.
– Giuseppe Tornatore

When I talk about cinematography of Giuseppe Tornatore I do have to mention any technical sides. To me, his signature is to show the poetic side of Dreaming. Through his bright imagination and clever visual storytelling complemented by sensitive music of Ennio Morricone, you could dive deep into those dreams.

When I wrote the story, when I made the movie, I wasn’t thinking of fame and fortune. The movie is not the product of a calculation. It was the result of a feeling and discover after so many years that so many people have been touched by it, telling me as you did that they were Toto.
I like to say that the world is populated by a big crowd of little Totos, and that’s great. I love it.
– Giuseppe Tornatore

Rain Man (1988) - Barry Levinson

Cinematographer - John Seale
It's all about characters, the transformation of one due autism of another.

Barry Levinson came on board after three previous directors resigned off on this movie. (Nobody could quite get a handle on it, make a personal connection).

If I can show the autism for what it is and understand it – show the frustration and the humor – if I can make the relationship work with these two guys on the road, then that’s enough for me.
– Barry Levinson

Imho, Rain Man is a unique movie in terms of the point of view of characters. Their limitations, acceptance and transformation.

Someone once said to me, “Well, write an outline for the thing.” I said, “I can’t.” I’d be writing an outline until I die. If I’d tried an outline for Diner, I’d never have finished. Get me to the character. When I get to the character, then it makes sense to me. Then I know where it’s going, and then it all opens up.
– Barry Levinson

John Seale on shooting spherical or anamorphic format.

Spherical (1:85) to me has always been more of a people format, whereas anamorphic is more of a scenic format.
– John Seale

Time of the Gypsies (1988) - Emir Kusturica

Cinematographer - Vilko Filac
Mythical, compositional, colour, music and absurd paradise.

The Gypsies of my film survive like insects, according to the principle of the natural selection, according to the beauty of the colours and the shapes of the wings.
– Emir Kusturica

Kusturica keeps the animals as an essential part of his film language and frequently points at the Magical Realism connections in the incredible architecture built in his scenes.

In Gypsy mythology, geese are the animals who flew the Gypsies over the ocean and into Europe, which I think is beautiful. Geese are so elegant and somehow so intelligent that between one and many geese there is incredible harmony, plus they bring a great dynamic to a scene. It's also like a color you need to bring to a painting from time to time - my movies are not just based on the commercial need to tell a story. I like repeating those kinds of colors or motifs because they please me
– Emir Kusturica

The movie full of rhetoric meaning and symbolism, exposing many negative social aspects of Roma lives with satire and absurd.

Hopefully, in my films you get excited by every character you meet, as you do in Fellini's
– Emir Kusturica

Long opening shots and beautiful Roma music gives your soul the time to be drawn into an atmosphere completely. Kusturica's camera is constantly moving at a slow pace, sliding from one compositional frame to another as the scene progresses.

"My life is an utopy"

What I like the most, it is how organically Kusturica portrays the whole Roma community. Their freedom, the way they accepted life, their direct connection to joy, and their strength and optimism without hiding the bad side of the golden coin. Kusturica is a wanderer himself, just like the fairytale-gypsies in his films.

I am a man without a country, travelling between Paris and New York and Belgrade and Montenegro. My roots are in Herzegovina, but I don’t care about nationality. I care about higher values in human life.
– Emir Kusturica

The Last Emperor (1987) - Bernardo Bertolucci

Cinematographer - Vittorio Storaro
Distinctive composition, colours and light. Spectacular atmospheric environmental shots with emotion and history.

Storato uses not only different lights and hues to emphasize the mood but also plays with colour of objects in scenes using what in literature is called anaphora, a repetition of the same colour, in this case, to emphasize a concept.

Don’t forget that Leonardo da Vinci was calling 2 different elements: light and shadows. The marriage between them are creating children. The children are the color. That put it very nicely, but practically if you noticed the color coming from the blackness, and only when the primary element of black is activated creating red, orange, yellow, green, indigo, violet, and all together as Isaac Newton is teaching to us creating white light. So, this is a kind of verbal language, so you have to work like a writer is using words to transfer emotions, like a musician using notes, we using the knowledge of light and shadows and colors, and we can transfer emotions that way. Today, you don’t have to be only a technician, you have to be knowledgeable about the meaning of the visual art, you have to know the symbology, dramaturgy, and physiology. Everything is written in the writing with light. In light, in color, in elements.
– Vittorio Storaro

At each defining stage of The Last Emperor, a different colour dominates.
We see greys at the beginning as preparation for the new journey, the waiting.
In early shots of Pu Yi’s blood seeping into water, red defines his origins as a symbol of death and rebirth.

At the Emperor age between 5 and 8 years, orange becomes prominent. During the “orange period,” Storaro expresses Pu Yi’s internal state through light: for instance, there is no direct light on the emperor in the orange sequences because he had not yet emerged from the shadows to assume his identity. The orange defined the warmth and his connection with the family.

As Pu Yi becomes more conscious of his surroundings and becomes Emperor, the palette shifts to yellow. The colour of puberty, it's intuition and awareness which symbolizes the sun, the divine and its presence.

As the Emperor acknowledge the existence in the dull chromatic world of Forbidden City, colour expands as he acquires knowledge. Emphasized with green not only in tones but in objects itself (such as Pu Yi’s bicycle). It represents the flourishes of Life that starts again and knowledge that takes us to freedom.

The scenes and tones change to blue as the Emperor leaves the Forbidden City. Symbolizing the perspicacity of thinking, the freedom of intellect.
Within the context of red as the past and green as the present, blue became the colour of the future.

Around the age of 50 when Pu Yi realizes he wants to be an Emperor Again. We observe indigo. It represents full maturity, material power, the achievement of a level of Life.

After the grey years in communists prison, Pu Yi starts to accept his responsibility and the tones progress to violet; the full balance between passion and reason, the diffusion of knowledge, which represents the cyclic nature of life.

At the last years of Pu Yi's Life we the pure white. The sum of all colours, all phases, completeness of all feelings and passions.

There's one more colour which is always present: black. It is the matter, the beginning and the end, the presence and the absence of something and, of course, the unconscious.

Paris, Texas (1984) - Wim Wenders

Cinematographer - Robby Müller
Screenplay - Sam Shepard & Wim Wenders.
Music - Ry Cooder
Poetic movie that leans on Subtlety and the Inner World of its heroes.
Extraordinary beauty with Vivid Colours and Strong Composition.

We chose Harry Dean because he is one of the few adults I know who has kept the child that’s dead in most adults with him. He has an innocence about him.
– Wim Wenders

We tried to arrange the film in such a way that all sizes and types of American towns appear in it.
– Wim Wenders

I’d planned a real zigzag route all over America. But my scriptwriter, Sam Shepard, persuaded me not to. He said: ‘Don’t bother with all that zigzagging. You can find the whole of America in the one state of Texas.’
– Wim Wenders

Robby Muller's frequent use of magic hour sunsets, neon-lit barrooms, and street lamps that illuminate landscapes and people in phantasmagorical colours bring the contrasts and magical atmosphere, giving to each hero its own character in terms of Light and Colour.

It’s better if you know the ‘substance’ well and know were your general priorities are — Robbie Müller

Wenders makes you think this is what some character is seeing and all of a sudden it’s what you're are seeing.

Most of my films are exclusively designed from somebody’s point-of-view.
– Wim Wenders

Blue Velvet (1986) - David Lynch

Cinematographer - Frederick Elmes
Emotional and voyeuristic landmark with suspense and aesthetic of violence.

Lynch's dark visuals are infused with a peculiar beauty and humour. His evocative style could be described as “A dream of dark and troubling things.”

The whole idea of the film is going underneath the surface of a supposedly peaceful neighborhood in a small American town...
– David Lynch

Lynch delves deeper into the sensual textures of decay. Therefore the movie full of metaphorical details and close up stills. Like the fence with roses with the look from the down, like a childhood picture; or insects in a suburban lawn, etc.

David loves to go through things,” Elmes says, “and I find that fascinating. I don’t think I could ever compete with David because his imagination goes that way.
– Frederick Elmes

David employed film noir dark scenes into the middle of the movie, whereas the beginning and the end looked more cheerful.

We had always planned to have the beginning and the end look like this very cheerful — slightly too cheerful — a little-bit-more-than-real world that David wanted to create
– Frederick Elmes

Yet for the night scenes, there were no lights on the selected street, so the team added the light sources to get the feeling that there really are street lamps up in the trees.

We’d taken a vision of what the street should look like and executed it correctly, and the street lights became most of my light for those shots. Also, it gave us the ability to have a real street light that was up to proper exposure and tow a car underneath it for a dialogue scene that took place in the car.
– Frederick Elmes

I really like how creatively the hell ride kinda scene was created. The car was staying still and they moved light sources fast outside, conveying that the car is riding on high speed.

That sequence was all done with the camera hand held and the car standing still while bouncing up and down as a lot of people worked lights that moved past very quickly. It was all choreographed in such a way that we gave the feeling that they’re out on the road.
– Frederick Elmes

Another distinguishable example of Elmes practical creativity was Ben's club scene with the horror of claustrophobic feeling spiced with a humorous look of oddly amusing characters.

Depressing isn’t the word really, but it’s certainly not a normal situation, it’s a very unreal situation. We originally planned some complex blocking and some complex shots in the scene and realized after rehearsing it thoroughly on location that all you did was complicate it. In fact, what played very well was having the characters in one wide shot. You saw clearly what was happening, and they did it so well, that it took something away to clutter it with a camera move or to try to do something tricky with the lighting. There’s a kind of awkwardness that is intentional. I think that it’s meant to put everyone on the edge of their seat a bit.
– Frederick Elmes

The main set (Dorothy’s apartment) was quite fabulous and styled after the era by production designer Patty Norris. The palette of colours was very well chosen and set a real mood for the things that happen. Space was lit in such a way as to distinct the places from each other as much as possible in terms of mood.

It was quite a wonderful set and the detail was all there, it was functional, the bathroom worked!
– Frederick Elmes

The scene in the closet deserves special notice. Elmes and Lynch created a striking lighting effect by illuminating Jeffrey's face through the slots of the closet doors, which very well emphasized an element of his voyeurism.

We never shot anything that he couldn’t actually see from the closet. The set was designed in such a way that the closet was in a special spot where Jeffrey can see the living room, he can see down the hall to the bathroom, and he can see part of the kitchen, but he can’t see around the corner which is the place Dorothy sneaks up on him with a knife.
– Frederick Elmes

Blue Velvet soundtrack grew naturally from the film’s scenes. The subtly sound design by Alan Splett makes you drawn into the powerful mood of the film.

The material dictates the mood and it also dictates the sound, – he explains.
We tried to get the sounds that make the right mood and it’s so simple, it’s so logical. The rest is just train and error in the blending of those things, and it has to be just right, but you know when it is and you know when it isn’t.
– David Lynch

Blade Runner (1982) - Ridley Scott

Cinematographer - Jordan Cronenweth
Dystopian noir movie with the Cyberpunk look metaphorical narrative
and unique lighting.

Ridley Scott wanted it to be the character-driven story. So he gave to actors the freedom to change things up based on how they were interpreting the characters.
Rutger Hauer came up with the “tears in the rain” line the speech’s final, which became one of the most poetic lines in his career and in cinematography.

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain
– Rutger Hauer

We could feel the the mechanical-spiritual decay right from the opening shot: the perpetual nightscape of Los Angeles in 2019, the smog turned to black, the fallout turned to rain, the smokestacks blasting fireballs that look downright medieval against a backdrop of obsidian blight - VARIETY.

’Blade Runner’ changed the way the world looks and how we look at the world
– William Gibson (science fiction author)

Ridley Scott with the team created the groundbreaking visual look convaying the atmosphere and world of Cyberpunk and futuristic Los Angeles.

We used contrast, backlight, smoke, rain and lightning to give the film its personality and moods. The streets were depicted as terribly overcrowded, giving the audience a future time-frame to relate to. We had street scenes just packed with people. . . like ants. So we made them appear like ants — all the same. They were all the same in the sense that they were all part of the flow. It was like going in circles- like going nowhere. Photographically, we kept them rather colorless.
– Jordan Cronenweth (ASC, Mar 1999)

Naturally, to achieve that nostalgic cyberpunk look the set designs employed the heavy use of neon lights- lights like the ones in nighttime Tokyo. Jordan Cronenweth embraced the usage the untraditional shaft lighting and smoke that light was shown off with. Xenon lights (at the time more closely associated with large boats) became a key lighting source on a major Hollywood movie for the first time, which came to signify the futuristic look in many movies since then.

We used it over and over again in different applications. One way we justified their constant presence was to invent airships floating through the night with enormously powerful beams emerging from their undersides. In the futuristic environment, they bathe the city in constantly swinging lights. They were supposedly used for both advertising and crime control, much the way a prison is monitored by moving search lights. The shafts of light represent the invasion of privacy by a supervising force; a form of control. You are never sure who it is, but even in the darkened seclusion of your home, unless you pull your shades down, you are going to be disturbed at one time or another.
– Jordan Cronenweth (ASC, Mar 1999)

Ridley Scott’s vision, craft and use of special effects have passed the test of time and still remain equally captivating and magical despite of the critics.

...I never, ever read press again. Even if it’s glowing, best not read it, because you think you own the world. If it’s killer, best not read it because you think you’ve failed. You have to be your own critic.
— Ridley Scott

The Shining (1980) - Stanley Kubrick

Cinematographer - John Alcott
Unconventional classics of the horror movies. Creepy masterpiece based on Stephen King’s novel.

Tailor-made psychologically bizzare movie. Kubrick says the vast amount of it based on non-verbal supernatural communication and signs. The movie is full of little subtle points that at least subconsciously give you awareness of what must have happened.

"I ... found that thinking of shots, or thinking of the way to shoot a scene before you’ve actually rehearsed it and got it to the point where something is actually happening that is worth putting on film, will frequently prevent you from really getting into the deepest possible result of the scene."
– Stanley Kubrick

Kubrick is also famous for his deep, almost obsessive researches on every topic he works.

"in this film, the art director, Roy Walker, went for a month all over America photographing hotels, apartments, things that could be used for reference. We must have photographed hundreds of places. Then, based on the photographs we liked, the draughtsmen drew up the working drawings from the photos, but keeping the scale exactly as it was, exactly what was there, not something like it"
– Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick 11-minute interview on The Shining worth more than all written reviews on it.

in working with him (Kubrick) there is always a different outlook, a different idea: “Let’s try something different. Is there any way we can do it differently? Is there any way we can make it much better than it was before?"
– John Alcott

P.S. Great movie evening at Home might be much better than spending the time and money for some mediocre film in Cinema.

When you would watch the movie by this recommendation and Enjoy it,
I would appreciate any contribution, which will help me to cover the website costs or just to buy a Glass of Wine for the next movie evening

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VOLUME 1 (Cinematography 2000s, 2010s)

Street and Documentary Photography Award Highlights Worldwide

Andrii Mur — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 11:26:11 GMT

Here you will find the selection of highlights and award winners in Street & Documentary photography with the most of available video compilations and the references to the original offsites, all in one place (Selection of 2018 and a few years before, in addition).

Note: The Winner is same as above. Therefore below is the 2nd Prize winner:

London Street Photography Festival (LSPF) 2018 Finalists

The Street Photography International (SPI) Street Awards 2018 Finalists

Alghero International Street Photography Awards (ASPA) 2018 Winners (Singles)

Life Framer - Street Life Awards 2018

Sony World Photography Award Open Winners 2018

Bangkok Street Photo Festival (BKKSPF) 2018

Exibart Street 2018 Street Photography Contest Winner

Italian Street Photo Festival (ISPF) Contests Finalists 2018

Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2018 - Winners & Finalists

Hasselblad Masters Winners 2018

Burn My Eye “Best of 2018”

Highlights of 2017

Miami Street Photography Festival (MSF) Finalists 2017

LensCulture Street Photography Awards Winners & Finalists 2017

Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2017 - Winners & Finalists

Burn My Eye Collective 2017 Highlights

Highlights of 2016

Miami Street Photography Festival (MSF) Finalists 2016

LensCulture Street Photography Awards Winners & Finalists 2016

Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2016 - Winners & Finalists

Burn My Eye Collective 2016 Highlights

Highlights of 2015

LensCulture Street Photography Awards Winners & Finalists 2015

Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2015 - Winners & Finalists

Treat the Photographer with Coffee
("I spend my free Time to do it")

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Harry Gruyaert

Andrii Mur — Mon, 21 Jan 2019 10:19:42 GMT

Photographer from Belgium (born in Antwerp in 1941)
Colour pioneer (known for revolutionary and experimental use of colour)
Magnum photographer since 1981
Made photographs that reveal epiphanies of color and contours, prosaic moments of nothingness and vibrancy of banality, an overwhelming mystery of and silence of the actual reality.
Photographed colour in Morocco, shot TV screens, documented Belgium, explored contrasts between East and West, worked on his essays in France, USA & Soviet Union, Egypt, India... captured overlapping life found at the edges where the sea meats the land.
Influenced by: Pop Art by Andy Warhol, Magritte...
Printing: Cibachrome, Dye Transfer prints, Archival pigment prints.
Cameras: Canon 5D Mark XXX DSLRs with 24mm-... lens, etc.

He studied at the School of Film and Photography in Brussels from 1959 to 1962. Then he became a photographer in Paris, while working as a freelance director of photography for Flemish television between 1963 and 1967.

In 1969, he made the first of many trips to Morocco.

From 1970 to 1972 he lived in London. This is an opportunity for unprecedented visual experiments: he decided to "cover" the Munich Olympics of 1972 and the first Apollo flights, on a broken TV screen he has at its disposal, by manipulating the colors.

Between 1973 and 1980, he began a long essay on Belgium first in black and white and then in color.

Harry Gruyaert joined Magnum Photos in 1981 and continues many trips including Asia, USA, Middle East and Russia.

“During my first stay in the USSR in 1969, I expected to discover communism, and I found Dostoyevsky and Gogol.

In 1989, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I saw a society that was frozen and ossified, which no longer knew which god to turn to. Suddenly a palette of unknown, washed-out, muted colours was offered to me, the image of this universe which existed between two worlds.

In 2009, the choice of an aggressive capitalism and frenzied consumerism imposed itself: flashy advertising invaded the public space. But the “Russian soul” still dominates; there is not a much greater feeling of freedom.”
– Harry Gruyaert

For more than thirty years, from Belgium to Morocco, and from India to Egypt, Harry Gruyaert has been recording the subtle chromatic vibrations of Eastern and Western light.

Far from indulging in stereotypical exoticism, Harry Gruyaert has a vision of faraway countries that locates the viewer within peculiar and somewhat impenetrable atmospheres.

He photographs ambiguous meanings stabbed into deep absence. He photographs worlds of vibrating scale, double referenced scales that push and pull in opposite directions. Photographs almost read and almost unreal worlds truly overlapped. – Fading edges with no real centers are what he photographs: the perfect clarity of almost confusion already present, the shape- shifting transformations that almost, but don’t quite, happen. Mountainous clouds and cloudy mountains are what he photographs – stories not quite there, the faceless who almost inhabit them, watery lands and lumpy seas almost intertwined.
– Magnum Photos on Rivages

"We rewrite the world, then reread it. We redefine it. No center remains off-center, edges become impervious boundaries, we shift our focus to sustain our balance." – Richard Nonas

In the 2000s Harry Gruyaert abandons film to digital photography. Very concerned about the quality of prints made previously in Cibachrome and sometimes dye transfer, he experimented early in the inkjet printing. Better suited to revealing the rich shades found in his films, digital print opens new possibilities for his work, bringing it one step closer to his original intention, namely to give color the means to assert its true existence

Harry grows up in a strict and traditional Catholic Flemish family. His father forbids him to become a photographer because he sees it as sinful. So he decides to leave his country and travel. Coming from a repressed and grey background he discovers the lights and color of Europe. Driven by hatred and love and the irresistible desire to be a photographer, he becomes a pioneer in European color photography.

P.S. During the time of making this selection around 20 Cups of Coffee were consumed)) I produce content for Free and would be pleasantly surprised to get a free cup of Good Coffee

Donate with PayPal

There would be an Alternative Selection of photographs by Hurry Gruyaert, so do not get upset if you have not seen your favourite one here.

Books

"Harry Gruyaert" by François Hébel and Richard Nonas

"Harry Gruyaert: Maroc" by Harry Gruyaert

"Harry Gruyaert: East/West" by Harry Gruyaert

"Harry Gruyaert: Edges" by Harry Gruyaert

"Harry Gruyaert: Rivages" by Harry Gruyaert

Photography and Surrealism

Andrii Mur — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 10:53:48 GMT

The nature of photography is Surreal. By finding the precise intersection between the subject and the moment photographer could juxtapose two or more realities together transforming the Real into the Surreal

Sontag on Surrealism

In Susan Sontag’s Melancholy Objects essay from her “On Photography” book she links Documentary photography and Surrealism.

Yet it sounds like Sontag cherrypicks the Sensibility and ditches the Surrealism in general.

"That photography is the only art that is natively surreal does not mean, however that is shares the destinies of the official Surrealist movement. On the contrary. Those photographers... consciously influenced by Surrealism count almost as little today as the nineteenth century "pictorial" photographers who copied the look of Beaux- Arts painting."

She argues that photography was by itself surreal to its very core. And for Sontag the tendency towards voyeurism decisively undermines the reformist intentions of the documentary tradition.

"The mainstream of photographic activity has shown that Surrealist manipulation or theatricalization of the real is unnecessary, if not actually redundant."

Susan continues:

“Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision”

For Sontag the image of everyday is itself inherently Surrealistic.

"The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing."

Perhaps, Sontag sees taste for the surreal as being the basic tendency of the modern sensibility.

Thus the earliest surreal photographs come from the 1850s, when photographers first went out prowling the streets of London, Paris, and New York, looking for their unposed slice of life.

The surrealist’s seeking for 'the hidden reality' is not different from what motivates documentary photographers. Sontag states:

“Photography has always been fascinated by social heights and lower depths. Documentarists (as distinct from courtiers with cameras) prefer the latter.”

To sum up Sontag's position:

"Believing that the images they sought came from the unconscious, whose contents they assumed as loyal Freudians to be timeless as well as universal, the Surrealists misunderstood what was most brutally moving, irrational, unassimilable, mysterious--time itself. What renders a photograph surreal is its irrefutable pathos as a message from time past, and the concreteness of its intimations about social class"

It's clearly noticable that for Sontag also as for Barthes (“That-has-been”) the superimposition of the reality and the past is sureal by itself.

“In Photography [you] can never deny that the thing has been there."
– Roland Barthes

"Forget all the story of the image, just watch it. You would feel 'that has been'"

Barthes says the photographs are “the past and the real” and it's intrinsically surreal experience to have eye-contact with the dead (vanished).

"What I see is not memory, an imagination, a reconstitution, a piece of Maya, such as art lavishes upon us, but reality in a past state: at once the past and the real."
– Roland Barthes

Metaphysicalal side

I think in Sontag's Essay missed is the Metaphysical side of Surreal photography. To me it sounds like she wanted to defend the critical-reason behind the documentary photography and tried to draw the distinguishable line between photography and paintings.

"After 1800, the trend for thinking in collective terms seize the Romantics... the Romantic methaphysics of history and society, of the mind of the people and the nation, and which would always make it harder for the one to extricate from us."

Romantic aesticism was positive response to critics of Enlightment which throug the Kant led to a negative conception of the use of critical reason:

"They believed that art, and art alone, could fill the vacuum left by reason. If reason is essentially a negative power, art is basically a possitive one. While reason can only critisize, art can create. for the instrument of art is the imagination, which has the power to produce an entire world. The romantics built upon one of Kant's and Fichte's fundamental insigts: that we live in the world that we create; they add to it only that our creation should be a work of art. That this is the sum and substance of their famous 'magical idealism.'"

This Romantic power - power of life, power of nature, power of art - found its greatest transmission point in life and work of Nietzsche (German, 1844-1900).

"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."
– Friedrich Nietzsche

It is worth to empasize the contribution of Metaphysical painting to Surrealism.
Whereas the Surrealists looked to Freud's (Austrian, 1856-1939) theories of the unconscious, for Metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico (Italian, 1888-1978) main philosophical guide had been Nietzsche.

"Although the dream is a very strange phenomenon and an inexplicable mystery, far more inexplicable is the mystery and aspect our minds confer on certain objects and aspects of life"
– Giorgio de Chirico

Paul Delvaux (Belgian,1987-1994) was inspired by works of Giorgio de Chirico and merged the elements of Surrealism with classical forms, exploring the humanity and subconcious.

"Surrealism! What is Surrealism? In my opinion, it is above all a reawakening of the poetic idea in art, the reintroduction of the subject but in a very particular sense, that of the strange and illogical."
– Paul Delvaux

Surrealism (1924 - 1966)

Surrealists believed the rational mind repressed the power of the imagination, weighing it down with taboos. Emphasizing the power of personal imagination, they believed that revelations could be found in everyday life. The Surrealist's impulse to tap the unconscious mind remains influential up to now.

Freudian theory of psychoanalises was profoundly influential for Surrealists.
Sigmund Freud legitimized the importance of dreams and the unconscious as valid revelations of human condition, which became the one of the main theoretical basises for Surrealism.

"The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind."
– Sigmund Freud

One of the first artists to apply Sigmund Freud's dream theories was the author bird alter ego Max Ernst (1891-1976):

"Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation."
– Max Ernst

André Breton with his psychic automatism proposed to forgo conscious, bypass reason and rationality and express an actual functioning of thought by accessing the unconscious mind.

"Surrealism is based on the belief .. in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought."
– André Breton - Manifesto of Surrealism

The most famous Surrealist is nodoubt the Spanish Artist with flamboyant and provocative personalitty Salvador Dali (1904-1989). Dali called his main technique the paranoiac-critical^[1] method. He painted obsessive themes of eroticism, death, decay, mysticism, hallucinations, dreams and nightmares, optical illusions often filled with symbolism ranging from fetishes, animal imagery, nuclear physics to religious symbols.

"The fact that I myself, at the moment of painting, do not understand my own pictures, does not mean that these pictures have no meaning; on the contrary, their meaning is so profound, complex, coherent, and involuntary that it escapes the most simple analysis of logical intuition."
– Salvador Dalí

on Dali's retrospective:

"Once upon a time artists were controversial because of popular loathing; now apparently they are controversial because the public adores them."
– Cristopher Knight

he continues:

"Revisionist's (Dali's) curators get to play cliched role of rebellious artist, challenging conterfeit taboos, while mirroring Dali's vacuous careerism."

Belgian artist Rene Magritte preferred the quiet anonymity and settled on a deadpan and repetitions. The paradox of his beautifull and simplistic pictures that although those are made with incredible clarity, at the same time they provoke unsettling thoughts due to mystery of misunderstandings.

The perplexing and often mysterious and supernatural imagery of Surrealism is meant to kick the viewer out of their comforting assumptions and relies on reccuring motifs in author's unconscious mind.

The original Parisian Surrealists used art as a reprieve from violent political situations and to address the unease they felt about the world's uncertainties

Maurits Cornelis Escher (Dutch, 1898-1972) graphic artist did not belong to surrealists movement. He produced mathematicaly precise, yet very surreal worlds at that period.

Escher methodically pushed representative techniques to their limits. He constantly investigated plasticity of perspective and rythmic positioning in a space.

“If you want to express something impossible, you must keep to certain rules. The element of mystery to which you want to draw attention should be surrounded and veiled by a quite obvious, readily recognisable commonness.”
– M.C. Escher

Surreal Photography

Prosaic photographs disconnected from their original purposes and seen through the lens of Surrealist sensibility were appreciated in Surrealists movement.

Man Ray (American 1890–1976) embraced the possibilities for irrational combinations through partial surrender of compositional decisions to an accident. It brought him to the heart of Dada^[2] movement, and then to Surrealists movement in Paris led by Andre Breton.

“I have finally freed myself from the sticky medium of paint, and am working directly with light itself.”
– Man Ray

Eugène Atget’s (French, 1857–1927) documentary vision on vanishing Paris proved highly influential on the Surrealists in the 1920s, who found his pictures of street life, deserted streets, stairways and shop windows beguiling and richly suggestive

Andre Kertesz (French 1894–1985) has published the Series of nudes in 1933 presented under the title "Distotions". Through the mirrors he photographed - a body extracted from the surroundings in which we are used to see them and adopt forms that distort their natural proportions in oddy and often humoristic way.

Andre never was a member of the Surrealist movement, but it is natural to see
his “Distortions” in line with it as the one of the most organic and opened for questions project of that period.

Kertész’s nudes can be read in a range of different discourses. One of them is to read them as comments on the nude photograph’s traditional functions, which to a considerable extent highlighted the female body as the incarnation of harmonic and beautifulform. The pictures may also be seen as an ironic comment on how the female body depicted as a sexual object, had been a primary motif for photographers through the history of photography.
– Peder Lund Gallery

Unlike Man Ray, Andre never manipulated images, yet many of his works are Surreal by heart.

"I am not a surrealist. I am only a realist. All this group - surrealists - use my name. No, no, I am realist."
– Andre Kertesz

"I do not document anything, I give an interpretation."
– Andre Kertesz

Bill Brandt (German-British, 1904-1983 ) Surrealist who found beauty in the commonplace, blurring of the lines between the real and imagined.

" The good photographer will produce a competent picture every time whatever his subject. But only when his subject makes and immediate and direct appeal to his own interests will he produce a work of distinction."
– Bill Brandt

Discourse

Whereas Enlightenment (1685-1815) was relying mostly on rational thoughs and science, and the Romanticism (1800-1850) had redically opposed vision: "The Art for Art sake".

A philosopher Hegel (German, 1770-1831) thought that "The Art has to have purpose" and his lectures on Aesthetics set the end of Romantic period.

"Art is the sensuous presentation of ideas."
– Hegel

The pressure of radical rationalization tiggered discontent among the social groups, which reflected in Freud's psychoanalysis and importance of subconcious.

Andre Breton's approach was to estrange object in order to allow seeing it with all its strangeness like for the fist time. The goal was defimiliarize or displace the object by removing it from its expected context.

Once the object was removed from its normal circumstances, it could be seen without the mask of its cultural context.

What I like about Surrealism that it clearly emphasizes the idea of recontextualization and constant need in disenchantment and re-enchantment.
If to look in more Global context, exact same need for changes is a driving vehicle in a creation and turning of Art periods.

Moving further a philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (German, 1947-...) examines art considering the wide range of aspects, in its relation to ethics, metaphysics, society, politics, anthropology and the subject.

"Wherever one encounters members of the human race, they always show the traits of a being that is condemned to surrealistic effort. Whoever goes in search of humans will find acrobats."
– Peter Sloterdijk

Whereas Nietzsche called to the capacity to ruminate, Sloterdijk prescribed the capacity for breathing:

"The modern world process led to a point beyond which the most external path, politics, and the most inner path meditation speak the same language; both revolve orund the principle that only relaxation of tensions can help us along...Meditation and disarmament discover a strategic common interest."
– Peter Sloterdijk

Today, art is a “discourse”, as we know, a conceptual field in which
the different types of images, objects, processes, activities, theories, ideas and
institutions play a role. The dynamism of this field is characterized by instabilities,contradictions and conflicts that trigger disquiet among the one or other viewer.

"The visual field is constructed socially and the social field visually"
– W.J.T. Mitchell

We could say that Art depends on the social context and it affects it at the same time. Whereas mass-culture deceives masses, the Art has to preserve its critical function enlightening us on social illusions.

The Art reflects Society, yet it has to show what society could be and should be.

It has to insist to be perceptive not deceptive and expand out of the mass-culture to allow us to see out of set borders.

I believe that Art is Non-stop Discource towards recontextualization of the ordinary objects, which estranged from their original context become the sources of surprise and ignite the social transformation.

The fun part about it, that the piece of Art created in one context might be perceived completely differently in another one. That's why in one period some pictures resonate more than others. Those became the dimmed mirrors opened for infinite interpretations which reflect our personal ambiguities.

“That is the way with every true artwork, for each, as if it contained an infinity of intentions, were open to infinite interpretation, although one can never say whether this infinity was created by the artist or is the product of the artwork.”

"The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity"
– Alberto Giacometti

Modernists braked with the past and eager to search for new forms of expression.
PostModernism brought the broad skepticism, subjectivism and suspicion of reason.

Although Surrealism period has Ended (in 1966), the importance of Surreal would always remain Within.

"I believe that Surreal and Methaphisical are the particles of the photographic substance itself. Those help to convey the certain message or just to open the discource. A Photograph could contain multiple layers at the same time. Therefore there is no reason to reduce its completeness by splitting the each layer across the separate movements, where the other sides might be ingrorred and remained unseen. – Andrii Mur"

Books

"Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light" by Sarah Hermanson Meister and Lee Ann Daffner

"Andre Kertesz: The Mirror As Muse" by Andre Kertesz

Sources

paranoiac-critical method - "spontaneous spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena." ↩︎
Dada - An artistic and literary movement. Conceptual art movement which arose as a reaction to World War I and nationalism. ↩︎

Fine Art Photo Frame and Print Sizes

Andrii Mur — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 15:57:20 GMT

Printing is a Beautiful Struggle
— Andrii Mur (me ^_^)

I hope this Guide might reduce your Confuse about Photos Sizing and Framing.

Standart 'A' Series Paper Sizes

PAPER	Size (mm)	Size (inch)
A5	`148 x 210 mm`	5.8 x 8.3 in
A4	`210 x 297 mm`	8.3 x 11.7 in
A3	`297 x 420 mm`	11.7 x 16.5 in
A2	`420 x 594 mm`	16.5 x 23.4 in
A1	`594 x 841 mm`	23.4 x 33.1 in
A0	`841 x 1189 mm`	33.1 x 46.8 in

Standard Imperial 'inch' Frame Sizes

Frame Size (inch)	Mat Opening (inch)	Picture Size (inch)	Picture Size (mm)
8 x 10 in	4.5 x 6.5 in	5 x 7 in	127 x 177.8 mm
11 x 14 in	7.5 x 9.5 in	8 x 10 in	203.2 x 254 mm
12 x 16 in	10.5 x 13.5 in	11 x 14 in	279.4 x 355.6 mm
16 x 20 in	11.5 x 15.5 in	12 x 16 in	304.8 x 406.4 mm
20 x 24 in	15.5 x 19.5 in	16 x 20 in	406.4 x 508 mm
24 x 36 in	19.5 x 29.5 in	20 x 30 in	508 x 762 mm
30 x 40 in	21.5 x 31.5 in	22 x 32 in	558.8 x x 812.8 mm

16x20 Imperial 'inch' Pre-cut Mat Openings

Picture Size (inch)	Mat Opening (inch)	Border Size (inch)
5 x 7 in	4.5 x 6.5 in	5.75 x 6.75 in
8 x 10 in	7.5 x 9.5 in	4.25 x 5.25 in
8 x 12 in	7.5 x 11.5 in	4.25 x 4.25 in
9 x 12 in	8.5 x 11.5 in	3.75 x 4.25 in
10 x 13 in	9.5 x 12.5 in	3.25 x 3.75 in
11 x 14 in	10.5 x 13.5 in	2.75 x 3.25 in
12 x 16 in	11.5 x 15.5 in	2.25 x 2.25 in

Corresponding Imperial 'inch' Standards to Metric ones

Frame Size (inch)	Frame Size (cm)	Frame Size (mm)
5 x 7 in	`13 x 18 cm`	127 x 177.8 mm
8 x 10 in	`20 x 25 cm`	203.2 x 254 mm
11 x 14 in	`28 x 35 cm`	279.4 x 355.6 mm
12 x 16 in	`30 x 40 cm`	304.8 x 406.4 mm
12 x 18 in	`30 x 45 cm`	304.8 x 457.2 mm
16 x 16 in	`40 x 40 cm`	406.4 x 406.4 mm
16 x 20 in	`40 x 50 cm`	406.4 x 508 mm
18 x 24 in	`45 x 60 cm`	457.2 x 609.6 mm
20 x 20 in	`50 x 50 cm`	508 x 508 mm
20 x 28 in	`50 x 70 cm`	508 x 711.2 mm
28 x 39 in	`70 x 100 cm`	711.2 x 990.6 mm

Standard Metric 'cm' Frame Sizes with Mount

Frame Size (cm)	Mat Border (cm)	Image Size (cm)
13 x 18 cm	-	`10 x 15 cm (2x3)`
18 x 24 cm	2.75 x 2.75 cm	`13 x 18 cm`
20 x 20 cm	3.5 x 3.5 cm	`14 x 14 cm`
A4 (21 x 29.7 cm)		`15 x 20 cm`
24 x 30 cm	3.5 x 3.5 cm	`18 x 24 cm`
30 x 40 cm	5 x 5.5 cm	`A4 (21 x 29.7 cm)`
30 x 45 cm	-	`30 x 45 cm (2x3)`
40 x 50 cm	5.5 x 5.5 cm	`30 x 40 cm`
40 x 60 cm	5 x 5 cm	`30 x 50 cm`
40 x 60 cm	-	`40 x 60 cm (2x3)`
45 x 60 cm	-	`45 x 60 cm (3x4)`
50 x 50 cm	10.5 x 10.5 cm	`30 x 30 cm`
50 x 60 cm	5.5 x 5.5 cm	`40 x 50 cm`
60 x 60 cm	5.5 x 5.5 cm	`50 x 50 cm`
50 x 70 cm	5.5 x 5.5 cm	`40 x 50 cm`
60 x 80 cm	5.5 x 5.5 cm	`50 x 70 cm`
A3 (29.7 x 42 cm)		`A4 (21 x 29.7 cm)`
70 x 100 cm	10.5 x 10.5 cm	`50 x 70 cm`

*Note: Consider proportions you have 2x3, 3x4, 4x5 etc.

P.S. It helped me to not waste time and money on producing incorrect prints.
Found it helpful as well? I would appreciate your gratitude.

Donate with PayPal

Conclusion

Probably the most customer friendly thing you can do is to make sure your Print fits a standard frame size

To achieve it it's good to decide before resizing, whether you want to frame it with Passepartout or not. Whether you want to sign it on front or on back. Whether you want additional black border or not. In the edge case, anyway it's simpler and cheaper to cut the custom Mat size than to make a custom Frame.

Bonus

Common Mount (Border) is 5 cm and 5.5 cm or 2.25 in
A3 Poster Border 2.5 cm or 1 in
Pre-cut Mount can not be smaller than 2 cm
Usually the Smaller the picture the Bigger the Mount
Fine Art prints often have bigger bottom mount to balance the photo weight (weighted)
The minimum Bleeding is 5 mm or 0.25 in (that will go under the frame)
The Black border before the White canvas of Silver Gelatin prints printed in Darkroom is 1mm, 2mm or 5mm
10 x 15 cm with the 15mm white payout will give you 13 x 18 cm standart
A5 format allows to fit 2x3 ratio (13 x 19.5 cm) picture with 10mm payout

p.s. If you're using mm during resizing use mm if inches than in. Do not mix them up from step to step!

* All photographs used in post example are made by Andrii Mur

Movies for Photographers Vol. 1 (Cinematography 2000s, 2010s)

Andrii Mur — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 10:51:50 GMT

Once I've borrowed projector from the friend ...^_^

I have selected more than 90 movies with the great Cinematography work that deserves attention of any visual Enthusiast. Here is the Volume One of my List.

Roma (2018) - Alfonso Cuarón

Cinematographer - Alfonso Cuarón
Large Format ARRI ALEXA 65, Prime 65 Lenses
Greatly composed, naturalistic digital black-and-white masterpiece

We always have the same complaint when shooting a movie:

“It’s not equipment — it’s time, I want to do a film the way I’d love to do it.” — Alfonso Cuarón

In terms of Alfonso's working method, when developing Roma‘s look, “the constant reference was Ansel Adams.” Specifically, Adams’ Zone System, to take into consideration all the various scene elements within the photographic frame. The Large format camera suggested by Lubezki brought “unbeatable” dynamic range allowing to utilize both foreground and background, each informing the other.

The camera is moving at a different tempo than the actors and becomes almost like a consciousness revisiting the story. The camera knows something the actors do not. It’s very powerful. (E. Lubezki)

Dunkirk (2017) - Christopher Nolan

Cinematographer & Director of photography - Hoyte van Hoytema
IMAX 65mm camera
Great interplay of three timelines (land, air, sea) and use of natural light.

“It’s quality and there’s nothing like it.”
– Hoyte van Hoytema

“We always tried to be as much as possible in some sort of a point of view situation”
– Hoyte van Hoytema

“To experience all these moments as if you were there was the most important visual cue. Where does the camera have to be and what kind of lens provides the most immersive experience?”
– Hoyte van Hoytema

Blade Runner 2049 (2017) - Denis Villeneuve

Cinematographer - Roger Deakins
Visually stunning work with the meaning through Colour and Horizon line level.

The bold colors of “Blade Runner 2049” were done in-camera, without manipulating the image in the DIT or color-grade, yet via the tweaking and mixing the lights.

Roger Deakins also used massive ring lights and water reflections to evoke different emotions.

Drawing inspiration from the brutalist architecture of London, the smog of Beijing, the shipyards of Bangladesh, and the red dust storms of the Sahara, Deakins describes their concept as, “what would feel possible based on what is already happening today.”

La La Land (2016) - Damien Chazelle

Cinematographer - Linus Sandgren
Visually Rich and Colorful Musical Romance shot on Film.

La La Land was shot predominantly using a Panavision 35mm lens and 40mm Anamorphic^[1] lens for the scenes with scenes with close zooms.

“…Wanted the film to be an homage to old Hollywood musicals, and the craft of filmmaking, and the craft of making music properly with instruments and not on synthesizers, he felt that the film had to be shot in the scope format, anamorphic, because he loves anamorphic lenses in general, and scope would fit the film.”

The Neon Demon (2016) - Nicolas Winding Refn

Cinematographer - Natasha Braier
Created Universe of Fashion Horror in Neon Lights. The hyper-stylized World with extreme Aesthetics and Bold Colors.

“He is a highly stylized filmmaker, with the concepts and thinking behind his images, but he also rides the wave of the unexpected to the extreme, so much so that he even shoots his films in chronological order and his script completely mutates while shooting.”
– Natasha Braier

Shot digitally with 'Alexa' and with precisely selected Old lenses the movie has porcelain skin tones and Vivid colors. It has a limited color palette and All extreme colors, lights and shadows were captured in camera.

Carol (2015) - Todd Haynes

Cinematographer - Edward Lachman
Shot on Film. Inspired by documentary work of Helen Levit and photographs of Saul Leiter. With its anthropomorphic quality of film grain and referencing to the narrowed Ektachrome colour range, Todd Haynes movie reveals the pre-Eisenhower period in a very naturalistic way.

"I didn’t realize that people in different time periods saw color in a different way."
– Edward Lachman

The Hateful Eight (2015) - Quentin Tarantino

Cinematographer - Robert Richardson
Music Composer - Ennio Morricone
The film shot with 65mm film, using Ultra Panavision Anamorphic^[1:1] 70mm lenses, capturing an aspect ratio of 2.76:1.

“I thought it could be really cool in this claustrophobic situation,” Tarantino argues. “It makes the close-ups very, very intimate."

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) - Wes Anderson

Cinematographer / Director of Photography - Robert D. Yeoman
The Comedic fairy-tale-like story with vivid Colours and great Composition.

Hotel shot on 35 millimeter film.
Surprising square-ish 1:37 (4:3) Academy ratio (1930s scenes).
1.85:1 (16x9) ratio (1985s scenes); super-wide 2.39:1 (1960s scenes).

Like Stanley Kubrick, a devotee of “one-point perspective,” Anderson gravitates to shots with perfectly centered focal points, creating the precisely structured scenes.

“I’ve practiced those kinds of shots so many times it’s become sort of second nature for me,” – Yeoman

Through The Whip Pan camera movement Yeoman ties everyone into the scene (cause it's done in a single shot).

The vivid colours used in film create this fairy-tale-like story.

“Wes did research at the Library of Congress and found these old black and white pictures of people in hotel lobbies which had been hand-colored. He was fascinated by that process and early on we explored the idea of making the whole movie look like this early version of Kodachrome, hand-tinted photography,” says Yeoman. “In the end Wes decided to go a more traditional route, but those old photos influenced the way we framed some of those scenes.”

Birdman (2014) - Alejandro G. Iñárritu

Cinematographer - Emmanuel Lubezki
The movie looks as if it were shot in one extended take[^2]

"It was like a ballet — that's what made it truly exciting," – Emmanuel Lubezki

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014) - Roy Andersson

Cinematographer - István Borbás, Gergely Pálos
Incredible, Philosophical, captivatingly Strange and Dreamlike movie about human condition, with the Dark Humor and amazingly structured scenes.

"I’m trying to show what it’s like to be human and to be alive."
– Roy Andersson

Most of the scenes are static, hyperrealistic and well-composed (each set is hand-built). Persons and faces are seen in the middle-distance, never close-up, yet with pin-sharp clarity through the whole stage. Often things are changing in the background.

"A society where one shares, and feels responsibility towards others. Unfortunately, we’ve had a period where to look after one another is seen as old-fashioned. This is the path Sweden has taken politically. But it’s evident that it hasn’t worked out. It is a painful insight, which I think people will start to realise more and more."
– Roy Andersson

Each scene has a meticulous balance between the beautiful and sad. There is so much loneliness, so much sadness and tragedy in them, yet at the same time, they are very beautifull.

"I’m trying to show we have to care for the little we have left. I want to show the vulnerability, and the weakness we carry."
– Roy Andersson

The Great Beauty (2013) - Paolo Sorrentino

Cinematographer - Luca Bigazzi
Evocative, sensitive & Visually resplendent film. It is choreographically beautiful, headed towards a dreamlike state, and has well-calculated composition.

Paolo has known for his long takes, yet here he had a chance to do long shot only in the end of the movie.

"The movie is trying to say that everybody can find a form of beauty in all the moments of his life and also in the moments where there is the vulgarity, the squalor. If you try to go out for a moment in your life, you can see the beauty everywhere in your own life."
– Paolo Sorrentino

"We are telling the story of Italian humanity, which for 20 years was dominated by Berlusconi and the vulgarity that this person has brought to our country. So it's the attempt to tell the horrors brought to a beautiful city like Rome."
– Bigazzi

Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) - Jim Jarmusch

Blissfull masterpiece, graceful romance, atmospheric movie with deep music vibes, slow pace and dark humor.

In all Jarmusch’s films, the common denominator is Pacing. It always leisurely allows to establish the tone and compliment the intimate, revealing character-driven narratives.

Jarmusch has been trying to make the movie for seven years, and whenever a bump in the road had him ready to abandon the project, Tilda Swinton would insist: "That's good news, it means that now is not the time. It will happen when it needs to happen."

In Only Lovers Left Alive Stillness is essential to the film’s pacing.
Jarmusch uses slow motion, even superimposing slow-motion shots in scenes of the dancing to suppress the movement. The interesting addition is the antithesis to the restrained pace of the film, which you could find in one of the characters, which embodies action, energy, speed, and ultimately recklessness.

They live apart because they can, because it doesn't deprive them of time together. "If you live that long, separation for a year might feel like a weekend," says Jarmusch, his voice a spacey drawl. "It's not an obligation, it's an emotional connection." It's one so strong that Adam, a natural romantic who sees poetry in science, intimates that his relationship with Eve is an example of Einstein's theory of entanglement: "When you separate an entwined particle, and you move both parts away from the other, even on opposite ends of the universe if you alter or affect one, the other will be identically altered or affected."
– THEGUARDIAN

Ida (2013) - Pawel Pawlikowski

Director of Photography - Ryszard Lenczewski, Lukasz Zal
Black and White Compositional Masterpiece. Filled with graceful Stillness and immense Beauty, with the aesthetic of loneliness, sadness, nostalgia and post-war symbolism.

“I’m not emotionally excited by the power of cinema’s tricks anymore,”
– Pawlikowski

"Clearing away clutter, Pawlikowski almost never moves the camera; many of the scenes are just long-lasting shots, fed by a single light source that often puts the faces in partial shadow (what we understand of these two women will always be limited)" - THE NEW YORKER

"Shooting still photography not only gives me a way to communicate with directors in a straightforward, visual manner but it also gave me a lot of independence."
– Ryszard Lenczewski

DP Ryszard Lenczewski took 3000 photographs to previz and storyboard the film.

Lenczewski prefers Digital, yet he uses it with the Photographic respect:

"What I’m more worried about is digital compositing. In that case, you really start to remove the actors from the real world. I hope that digital compositing can be used in a sensitive, careful way. But in the end, it’s OK — we have new brushes, but we are still painters."
– Ryszard Lenczewski

Black Swan (2010) - Darren Aronofsky

Cinematographer - Matthew Libatique
Fascinating, Psychologically Rich, Seductive and atmospheric movie full of aesthetics and Choreographic Beauty contrasted with the cruel intimate character study and fight against the Alter Ego.

"On 'The Wrestler' and 'Black Swan' especially, the camera started to become a character of its own. How we blocked scenes became very, very fluid and moveable because we had a moving handheld camera."
– Darren Aronofsky

To emphasise the psychosis the camera is almost never still (almost having a mind by its own). In practicing scenes, the camera is tilted even five or ten degrees, never offering perfection. In subway it follows the character, it shakes and judders to resonate with uncontrollable insanity. To mark the sense of paranoia and alter ago the film is rightfully plagued with mirrors (the reflections sometimes behave by their own), doubles and reflective surfaces.

"If it’s any genre, it’s some type of Gothic ballet genre. A lot of ballets are really Gothic and tragic fairy tales. That’s the kind of the tone I was going for."
– Darren Aronofsky

A Single Man (2009) - Tom Ford

Director of Photography - Eduard Grau
Cameraoperator - Christopher Blauvelt
The Sensitive interplay between the Colour and Symbolism.

“The whole process of working on this film was magical. This was such a beautiful film to watch, but it also works at so many levels because of the depth to the story. And then the performance given by Colin Firth was absolutely sublime.”
– Eduard Grau

The Man Who Wasn't There (2001) - Coen brothers

Cinematographer - Roger Deakins
Amazing black & white Noir movie with a beautiful Lights and Shadows.

It is a black and white film yet it was actually shot in color and afterwards converted to black and white in post-production to retain more control over the process.

"...the whole mood and the sadness, it’s cinema, you can’t actually explain it because it’s pure cinema. It makes you feel and think something only cinema can do.” – Roger Deakins

"It doesn’t matter what you record the image on. It’s the image you’re recording that’s important. It’s the framing, the way you move the camera, the choice of shot, the lighting within the scene. It’s not what you record the image on."
– Roger Deakins

Amélie (2001) - Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Cinematographer - Bruno Delbonnel
An Exceptional movie with a specific warm colour palette infused with reds and greens, with soft light and white angles. Shot on film.

"There are maybe 20 amazing directors in the world, and that’s it. The rest are crap. When I say crap, they just do coverage, and then they edit the movie and expect that it’s going to be a success."
– Bruno Delbonnel

"Do All the mistakes. Do all of them. Shoot something and you will discover something. And these discoveries are so beautiful, that you'll be happy"
– Bruno Delbonnel

Malèna (2000) - Giuseppe Tornatore

Cinematographer - Lajos Koltai
Music Composer - Ennio Morricone
A Beautiful and seductive movie with a lot of extraordinary humor and deep emotions.

“When I wrote the film, I wrote it for her - I knew that Monica Bellucci would be Malena. That was extraordinary."
– Giuseppe Tornatore

Some 3000 boys were considered, then reduced to 100, to 30, and finally to 9 who could improvise by asking the actress portraying Malena anything they liked.

“They were all a little shy, but at one point Giuseppe Sulfaro, while we were shooting, started asking her questions–‘How old are you? Do you have a boyfriend?’ Then he asked: ‘What size bra do you wear?’ The actress said: ‘I don’t know. Why don’t you look? Look for yourself.’ And he unbuttoned her shirt and said, ‘You’re the third size.’ He didn’t blush at all. It was incredible…. You could see that he had a receptive and reactive capacity that was very strong.” It was that incident which clinched the role for Sulfaro, and Tornatore says that he never for a moment regretted the choice.

“I knew that picking the wrong kid would mean throwing the film into the garbage.”
– Giuseppe Tornatore

La leggenda del pianista sull'oceano (1998) - Giuseppe Tornatore

In the Mood for Love (2000) - Wong Kar-Wai

Cinematographer - Christopher Doyle & Mark Lee Ping Bin
The Poetical movie, full of the beautiful Silence of love and longing, serene feeling, with captivating music, vivid colours and brilliant juxtapositioning.

"In my world I think space can be formed by light in order to create poetry"
– Christopher Doyle

Cinematography of In the Mood for Love is full of the scenes conveying the sense that something is ‘out of reach’, which emphasizes of what is happening between Chow and Su. A camera placed in a narrow hallway, cracked wall, walking shadows, the phone, old mirrors, plants, curtains, windows, all of those distractions, which do not allow us to see the scene openly, create that sense of unreachability distantiating us further, adding the layer of detachment to emotions, to loneliness, to memories, to the sense of loss, to an irony of crying violin.

"I think the films that we've been trying to make try to give you a sense of space a sense of why this story happens because it happens here"
– Christopher Doyle

It's an amazing repetition of feelings and frozen details, and graceful movements, and rhymes of wardrobe patterns, and choreographic like scenes, that resonate in the rhythm of the waltz. It's fair to say, Christopher Doyle creates the Dance between the camera and the actors.

The movie is so visually rich, that I'm seduced to change the image above which represents it, again and again ^-^)

You May also Enjoy (cinematography by Christopher Doyle)

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VOLUME 2 (Cinematography 1980s, 1990s)

William Eggleston

Andrii Mur — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 18:35:48 GMT

William Eggleston

American photographer (born Memphis, Tennessee, July 27, 1939)
Colour pioneer (adopted Dye-transfer printing)
Loved music, played the piano, liked jazz and poetry, was a part of bohemian life
Made the pictures that reveal the signs of Life and signs of Decay
Influenced by Henri Cartier Bresson, Tom Young, Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Johann Sebastian Bach, Cezanne, his friend dentist...
Influenced by him: movie directors David Lynch, Coen brothers, Sofia Coppola, Barry Jenkins, Wes Anderson, photographers Juergen Teller, Wolfgang Tillmans and Nan Goldin...
Cameras: Canon Rangefinders, Leicas...

Explored the poetics of the Built Environment - everyday things that define the culture that we pay no attention too. Like miles per hour on the signs for the school zone. The signs of Life which reveal to us Who We Are.

"Eggleston imprints our memories with the familiar. ...Eggleston constructs a narrative tale, that at first glance from image to image seems disjointed then the sequence of images locks into focus and we understand their meaning."

Eggleston as Walker Evants was able to see the Presense as it was the Past.

The way he photographed is very different from others. With the awareness, with an attitude of freedom. Like the scenes illuminated with car lights, with the light beam from the inner glass...

Seizing on the blankness as the very thing to see, he joins the poet Wallace Stevens in voyaging through the God-less realms where it is left to the hapless twentieth-century self, embarked on its own idiotic quest, to discern the difference between the “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

Eggleston photographs are scientifically based yet often beautiful at the same time.

There are so many elements that, all added together, constitute what one calls art. It must contain all of the elements to be called art.

The colours are rendered extraordinarily vivid, lending the mundane a certain kind of specialness. These photos are casual, intimate, and yet carefully composed.

Eggleston photographs his subjects with a sense of emotional detachment or estrangement, treating them almost as a piece of street furniture.

The most of his prints are Dye-transfer prints. The most expensive photographic process available which was used solely for commercial work helped him to achieve his signature bright hues.

In the 1970s, his breakout as a photographer brought him in close proximity to Patti Smith, Lou Reed, and Andy Warhol’s Factory scene.

At 5, I was already very much interested in Johann Sebastian Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Franz Schubert, and Stravinsky. But I had a hard time playing at that age—I would try to find something I knew quite well, but I didn’t know how to really play it. I would get angry. My mother would come around and say, “Oh, you’re learning."

When I became a teenager I discovered a lot of good musicians, like Joe Turner and LaVern Baker. I still listen to some of them. Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle, and Roll,” which I still think is so beautiful, had just come out then
One song that comes to mind is LaVern Baker’s “Tweedlee Dee.” It’s just delightful. She was one of a kind, not like most of the other rhythm and blues music.

I was still playing the the work of J.S. Bach on piano all the time. And I was listening to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan quite a bit then.

"The music's here then it's gone – like a dream"
– William Eggleston

“The Red Ceiling is so powerful, that in fact I’ve never seen it reproduced on the page to my satisfaction”
– William Eggleston

In his mid-30s based in Memphis, Tennessee, self-taught and barely known outside the in-crowd, William Eggleston showed his works to long-term director of photography at MoMA John Szarkowski. In their collaboration 75 prints were selected...

On 25 May 1976, an exhibition opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that blew apart American photography. The Most could not understand it. New York Times review declaring it “the worst show of the year.”

“It got a tremendous amount of recognition, great amount of it negative. Well, I felt sorry for them because it’s so obvious. It’s like they’d got the wrong job because they didn’t understand what they were looking at…they wrote pretty stupid things.”
– William Eggleston

William Eggleston's camera just wants to see:

“The camera wants to know”
– William Eggleston

Despite that Eggleston claims he was more fascinated by the tonal properties of The Decisive Moment. The following statement sounds to me more like compositional Bresson's trick.

“I’ve always assumed that the abstract qualities of [my] photographs are obvious. For instance, I can turn them upside down and they’re still interesting to me as pictures. If you turn a picture that’s not well organized upside down, it won’t work.”
– William Eggelston

"I think of them as parts of a novel I’m doing."
– William Eggleston

Sometimes elements are fragmented or revealed just partially.

“I want to make a picture that could stand on its own, regardless of what it was a picture of. I’ve never been a bit interested in the fact that this was a picture of a blues musician or a street corner or something. ”
– William Eggelston

“I am at war with the obvious.”
– William Eggleston

He had a descipline to make a one picture of one thing:

“I only ever take one picture of one thing. Literally. Never two. So then that picture is taken and then the next one is waiting somewhere else.”
– William Eggelston

Excerpt form The Democratic Forest

"Well, I've been photographing democratically"
– William Eggelston

“By the time he published 'The Democratic Forest' (his second book, in 1989), there is really no adherence to the principle of the decisive moment, which had so dominated photography for decades,” says Soth. “It is a conceptual conceit of pure openness, more akin to the composer John Cage’s idea that you should be attuned to the presence of everything around you at all times. Only someone so instinctively gifted and confident as Eggleston could have pulled it off. Many others have since tried and failed to do the same.”

All subjects are given equal prominence.

“I don’t have a burning desire to go out and document anything. It just happens when it happens. It’s not a conscious effort, nor is it a struggle. Wouldn’t do it if it was. The idea of the suffering artist has never appealed to me. Being here is suffering enough.”
– William Eggelston

Afterward from The Democratic Forest

William Eggleston in Conversation with Mark Holborn

I was in Oxford, Mississippi for a few days and I was driving out to Holly Springs on a back road, stopping here and there. It was the time of year when the landscape wasn't yet green. I left the car and walked into the dead leaves off the road. It was one of those occasions when there was no picture there. It seemed like nothing, but of course there was something for someone out there. I started forcing myself to take pictures of the earth, where it had been eroded thirty or forty feet from the road. There were a few weeds. I began to realize that soon I was taking some pretty good pictures, so I went further into the woods and up a little hill, and got well into an entire roll of film.

Later, when I was having dinner with some friends, writers from around Oxford, or maybe at the bar of the Holiday Inn, someone said, 'What have you been photographing here today, Eggleston?'

'Well, I've been photographing democratically,' I replied.

'But what have you been taking pictures of?'

'I've been outdoors, nowhere, in nothing.'

'What do you mean?'

'Well, just woods and dirt, a little asphalt here and there.'

I was treating things democratically, which of course didn't mean a thing to the people I was talking to. I already had different, massive series. I had been to Berlin and to Pittsburgh and completed huge bodies of work. From that moment everything from the boxes of thousands of prints made cohesive sense for the first time. All the work from this period from 1983 to 1986 was unified by the democracy. Friends would ask what I was doing and I would tell them that I was working on a project with several thousand prints. They would laugh but I would be dead serious. At least I had found a friend in that title, The Democratic Forest, that would look over me. It was not much different from Cartier-Bresson bringing the whole world from America to China to The Decisive Moment.

I had picked up The Decisive Moment years ago when I was already making prints, so the first thing I noticed was the tonal quality of the black and white. There were no shadow areas that were totally black, where you couldn't make out what was in them, and there were no totally white areas. It was only later that I was struck by the wonderful, correct, composition and framing. This was apparent through the tones of the printed book. I later found some actual prints of the same pictures in New York. They were nothing - just ordinary looking photographs, but they were the same pictures I had worshipped and idolized, yet I wouldn't have given ten cents for them. I still go back to the book every couple of years and I know it is the tones that make the composition come across.

I am afraid that there are more people than I can imagine who can go no further than appreciating a picture that is a rectangle with an object in the middle of it, which they can identify. They don't care what is around the object as long as nothing interferes with the object itself, right in the centre. Even after the lessons of Winogrand and Friedlander, they don't get it. They respect their work because they are told by respectable institutions that they are important artists, but what they really want to see is a picture with a figure or an object in the middle of it. They want something obvious. The blindness is apparent when someone lets slip the word 'snapshot'. Ignorance can always be covered by 'snapshot'. The word has never had any meaning. I am at war with the obvious.

-From a conversation with Mark Holborn, Greenwood, Mississippi, February 1988

My Humble Opinion

Eggleston photographed of whatever and wherever. Despite that, his works have been derided and called "boring", described as “erratic and ramshackle” dismissed with trivial and dull... - He challenged himself and the whole photographic World.

“I knew that red was the most difficult colour to work with,” he said. “When you look… it is like red blood that’s wet on the wall. A little red is usually enough, but to work with an entire red surface was a challenge. I don’t know why. It’s as if red is at war with all the other colors.”

Eggleston claimed he never took the same picture twice (Bresson's influence sounds to me here again). This “snapshot style,” as Weski called it, resulted in images that were “rebellious, unwieldy, uncomfortable, and thus not easy to decipher.”

He made photographs with feel, irrationally, subconsciously, not searching for the meaning, with no eager to document everything just waiting for when it happens and being grateful for it. He observed with sensitivity, done it scientifically yet with equal meaning and at the same time meaningfully at all.

Eggleston focused on the ordinary, the banal, and the ugly as his subject matter and elevated it to be utterly fascinating.
He photographed on the Edge and with the freedom, puzzling the viewer, reminding of the familiar, completely dissociated yet curiously observing not obvious in mundane.

I would say: William Eggleston photographed the resonance of Nothing in Everything and Everything in Nothing

Eggleston has proven that powerful art can be created without boundaries of trends and critics. His colour achievement will live on, but his creative spirit will endure even longer.

Books

"William Eggleston's Guide" by John Szarkowski

"William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest - Selected Works" by William Eggleston

It's All about Time

Andrii Mur — Wed, 07 Mar 2018 11:44:17 GMT

There are always two perspectives of time in photography:

The time when an event happens.
The time at which a photographer releases the shutter.

Good Photography comes from about the right time, but you also need the precise cut that enhances the floating moment.

The more time you hustle around with your equipment the less time you have to observe and make the picture.

Photography is the act of "fixing" time, not of "expressing" the world. The camera is an inadequate tool for extracting a vision of the world or of beauty
— Daido Moriyama

It's about time we started to take photography seriously and treat it as a hobby.
— Elliott Erwitt

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still
— Dorothea Lange

Fossils work almost the same way as photography: as a record of history. The accumulation of time and history becomes a negative of the image. And this negative comes off, and the fossil is the positive side. This is the same as the action of photography. So, that’s why I am very curious about the artistic stage of imprinting the memories of the time record. A fossil is made over four hundred fifty million years; it takes that much time. But photography, it’s instant. So, to me, photography functions as a fossilization of time.
— Hiroshi Sugimoto

Photography is about a single point of a moment. It’s like stopping time. As everything gets condensed in that forced instant. But if you keep creating these points, they form a line which reflects your life.
— Nobuyoshi Araki

Even though fixed in time, a photograph evokes as much feeling as that which comes from music or dance. Whatever the mode - from the snapshot to the decisive moment to multi-media montage - the intent and purpose of photography is to render in visual terms feelings and experiences that often elude the ability of words to describe. In any case, the eyes have it, and the imagination will always soar farther than was expected.
— Ralph Gibson

“There is nothing in this world that does not have
a decisive moment”
— Cardinal de Retz

In prephase to "The Decisive Moment" book Cartier-Bresson cites this quate bt 17th century Cardinal de Retz.

"Everything it's a fracture of the second. It's to be present, sensitive and receptive..."
— Henri Cartier-Bresson

Despite that Bresson often repeated Photographing, for me, is instant drawing in a 1957 interview with the Washington Post, he stated:

"Photography is not like painting. There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative… Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever."
— Henri Cartier-Bresson

Speed and instinct were at the heart of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s brilliance as a photographer. And never did he combine the two better than on the day in 1932 when he pointed his Leica camera through a fence behind Paris’ Saint-Lazare train station — TIME

Although it's not my favourite of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs, it has become quintessential example of the "Decisive Moment". The moment, where all the visual elements of the photo came together in resonance with each other, in that "rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning."
The main thing I want to notice is: the visual gap between the man's shoe and the puddle implies action, process and direction rather than finality. The moment right before it's completion, which merges subjective and objective worlds creating to us the ambiguity. As Cartier-Bresson said "it questions and decides simultaneously."

“Timing in photography is almost everything. You have to pay attention to where the light comes from, you have to pay attention to your background.”
– Fred Herzog

“Time… It’s all about time. You need lots of it. If you can afford this most cherished commodity, then you will be well on your way. Apart from that, good shoes, a degree of empathy, optimism and lots of spare batteries.”
— Matt Stuart

"Give it all you’ve got for at least five years and then decide if you’ve got what it takes. Too many great talents give up at the very beginning; the great black hole looming after the comfortable academy or university years is the number one killer of future talent."
— Carl De Keyzer

"I believe photography – like many other things one does in life – is the exact expression of who you are at a given moment.
Every time you compose and release the shutter, you give voice to your thoughts and opinions of the world around you.
...I would recommend working to become a more developed and informed individual, a more knowledgeable and engaged citizen. This will translate into a deeper more complex understanding of the world around you, and ultimately into richer and more meaningful photography."
— Paolo Pellegrin

Conclusion

I believe that compressed information in my mind on this topic looks like this:
You have to be in the right place, at the right time, and release the shutter in the precise fraction of the second in order to make a fossil of the fleeting moment where all elements perfectly resonate forming the structure that reveals the meaning.

And this post's main photograph, which is one of The Most Influential Images of All Time, Invasion of Prague, 1969 © Josef Koudelka - TIME 100photos with its evidence of the ticking time proves that the TIME is the one of the most important assets of LIFE.

P.S. Be in Touch and with the Time this article would become bigger 😉

Streetsroll

Mark Cohen

Books

@seeAlso

Stephen Shore

Books

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Saul Leiter

Books

@seeAlso

Ernst Haas

Books

@seeAlso

Fred Herzog

Books

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Edward Hopper

SeeAlso

William Eggleston Vol.2

William Eggleston

Movies for Photographers Vol. 2 (Cinematography 1980s, 1990s)

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You May also Enjoy (cinematography by Jeff Cronenweth)

You May also Enjoy (cinematography by Christopher Doyle)

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Bonus (^_^)

See Also

Street and Documentary Photography Award Highlights Worldwide

Highlights of 2020

Highlights of 2019

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Highlights of 2018

Highlights of 2017

Highlights of 2016

Highlights of 2015

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Harry Gruyaert

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Photography and Surrealism

Sontag on Surrealism

Metaphysicalal side

Surrealism (1924 - 1966)

Surreal Photography

Discourse

Books

Sources

Fine Art Photo Frame and Print Sizes

Standart 'A' Series Paper Sizes

Standard Imperial 'inch' Frame Sizes

16x20 Imperial 'inch' Pre-cut Mat Openings

Corresponding Imperial 'inch' Standards to Metric ones

Standard Metric 'cm' Frame Sizes with Mount

Conclusion

Bonus

Movies for Photographers Vol. 1 (Cinematography 2000s, 2010s)

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