VICTORIA GALLARDO
Sunday, July 12, 2020 - 5:07 PM
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There is an anecdote from Robert Doisneau who has been able to face the passage of time (almost) as well as his photographs. It was picked up by Sylvain Roumette during an interview in Paris, back in 1983. At one point in the meeting, Doisneau made the following reflection aloud: "I did not dare to photograph people. So my first photos were of cobblestones and yet he had the feeling that he saw people very well. Besides, he really seemed like a good boy, nobody messed with me. He was there with my wooden camera and later with my Rollei. Naturally, these images did not nobody was interested. " In the latter, he could not be more wrong.
In that same interview, the photographer confesses to his interlocutor that the same shyness to which he alludes is the one that, finally, helps him to find the exact distance from which to shoot: "I felt I could not be closer, but I did not dare to get closer . And it is precisely these images, the ones with a lot of air around them, which are now more moving. "
Today, Doisneau's snapshots speak with the same eloquence with which the night scenes of Gyula Halász, camouflaged in the dark alleys of Paris under his pseudonym Brassaï, or the prints of Henri Cartier-Bresson, continue to do so. All these photographers now come together, along with many other names, in the Camera and City exhibition organized by CaixaForum in Madrid, in collaboration with the Center Pompidou in Paris. The street as a social setting, as a political battlefield, but also as a playground. These views are nurtured and fed back with the same scenario as a common denominator, showing how throughout the 20th century these and other perceptions ended up coining a new term: street photography.
As the organizers of the show illustrate, it is from the 1950s that asphalt became the favorite place for many artists. There they are, for example, Joan Colom , with his tireless wandering around the Raval in Barcelona, or William Klein , with his nerve always ready to capture the smoke that escaped between the lips that hold a cigar, the frown of the boy who dedicates him his most sly grin, or the neons that, in capital letters, announce a movie night in the company of Kirk Douglas.
With certain hints of 'voyeur' that, in the past, outlined his profile, the image of the photographer who has the street as a habitat has been mimicked with that of a chronicler who lives on the asphalt. "The gaze on the other does not cease to be a bit inquisitive, exercised when exercised," concedes Nadia Arroyo, cultural director of Fundación Mapfre. "What happens is that we have already been more than a century of street photography, so what is done today can hardly have the effect of those first photos that Paul Strand took of street characters around the year 1916, which They made such an impact and how resounding they still are. " Considered one of the forerunners of direct photography, the purpose of this artistic aspect is to avoid any type of intervention or prior preparation when taking the images.
"The street photographer had no more intention than the wedding photographer," says José Luis Amores , director of the Efti International Center for Cinema and Photography. "Everyone documented. From the 20th to the 21st century, all that has existed has been a documentary photography. The photographer always reflected what he saw as a mere observer. Perhaps documentary film ends up delving into a series of slightly more communal and social of a time, and perhaps in Doisneau and other photographers what prevails is the moment of the shooting, but they do not stop being documentary makers, photographers who tell the history of society, nothing different from what Steve McCurry does on his travels "
Speaking of the well-known "decisive moment" that Cartier-Bresson reinvented in each of his shots, Arroyo emphasizes that, in his opinion, it no longer seems as decisive as in the past. "It had its moment and had a decisive influence on a whole generation of photographers, but if we only identified street photography with the work of Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt or Garry Winogrand, we would be left with a very limited vision. What would happen then? with Diane Arbus, Alberto García-Alix or Eamonn Doyle, whose photographs are sometimes posed, sometimes agreed, without movement, but so revealing? "he asks.
Returning to Doisenau and his shyness, when his interlocutor asked him if people used to look directly at the target, his answer was immediate: "I know that, for a time, the photograph must give the impression of having been taken without the model realized, maybe that was modern photography. In this way, it deprived itself of the emotional power of the gaze, which is uncontrollable and that always surprises me in old photographs, "he replied. "These people who send you this way, in full focus, this gaze, which is the only inheritance that it leaves to the posteriority , it is not known how, it always meets again from generation to generation. It is the wet side, the shore in the landscape "
Continuing with the similes, Enrique Sanz , president of the Royal Photographic Society, assures that the street is nothing other than "the river of life". "Our transits and our searches run through it. For the photographer, it is an inexhaustible source of stimuli: from that lost gaze of the passerby, his gestures, his clothing, his state of mind, his body posture, to that obsessive search for the strange and of the unusual, "he lists. "There are no mythical cities to photograph anymore. Any public place in the world can hide a story to tell. This is why we discover new realities every day through young photographers who investigate their immediate surroundings."
In that active search and, at times, devoid of any hint of dissimulation, lies the true authenticity. The search for the image that the photographer pursues without hiding. " That impudence may have given us the best photos of this genre , although others have also made a more personal impression, as is the case of Genín Andrada who, with a well-studied form of lighting and without direct shooting, freezes the moment of transit "Ramírez points out.
When it comes to instructing the students he teaches in this regard, there is something that Amores repeats to them like a mantra: " Photography is an act of feelings . It is you who is photographing, seeing and feeling, not the camera "he insists. "Posing what another person feels feels too complicated, and what the person acting feels too simple. Sometimes, photographers need to get something out of us that we cannot get out with the pencil, the brush or the words," he argues. .
For his part, Arroyo prefers to clarify that, although there are photographers who identify with the environment, there are also others who simply limit themselves to capturing it. "It is curious to see how Lee Friedlander identifies himself, blends in with his surroundings, the American landscape, and New York especially, but when he photographs outside of it, it shows that he is not in his sauce, " he cites as an example. "He himself admitted that he was not comfortable, that he did not identify with other countries, that when he was photographing in India, on the ground it seemed to him that he was taking interesting photos, but that when he revealed them he found them empty. Friedlander commented that he only knew a photographer able to blend in with any environment, in any country: Cartier-Bresson ".
The same Cartier-Bresson that Sanz likes to imagine wandering around with his Leica and approaching inches from people, shooting with the speed that manual drag allowed him, brings up the question of how new mobile devices and cameras are more compact have changed the way of looking and freeze reality. "They have given us the ability to go unnoticed , to be able to take a snapshot without raising suspicions, the speed and immediacy of the shot and its immediate transmission to social networks. Therefore, they have represented a new and different form of capture with respect to the traditional camera, "he points out.
"The professional, the artist, is not limited by the device he handles," says Arroyo. "Friedlander, to return to him, takes a street photo with a Leica or a Hasselblad; he changes the format, the definition, the framing, the result, but he is still a street photo. Stephen Shore works a lot today with his mobile phone, and we can find some different aspects in this work, but we continue to recognize his gaze on him, his ideas, his thoughts and his capacity for anticipation. " After all, as Amores remembers, the feeling comes from the photographer, not the camera. " What Cartier Bresson did not count was the number of decisive moments that passed him . When someone has that ability to generate such wonderful works, they do not have to count the disappointments."
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