My Photographic Inspiration #3

Henri Cartier-Bresson. The Father of Photojournalism and 'street style' photography

I would do the man a great injustice if I were to ramble off my thoughts about one of the greatest photographers the modern world has known. Few famous, and not so famous photographers can tell you with a straight face that they have not heard of the man.

Here is one article I found at Photo-seminars that touches on every aspect of this photographer's life and his work. It encapsulates all that I could wish to write about Mr. Cartier-Bresson. A modern hero.

Here are my favourite photos of Henri Cartier-Bresson.







Next : Paul Politis - Alive and cooking!

My Photographic Inspiration #2

Charles Sheeler

I've writen before how I love big machinery. Big trucks, heavy lift and industrial machinery and so forth. Not for the tons of pollution they create, but simply, their steely beauty.

Sheeler coined the name Precisionism, and it is a very real element in his photographs. The photos are all high definition reflections, with stark lines and tones. No photographers in his era and few since, have been able to capture the ugliness of industry in such a beautiful way.

Here's a few examples of his work. You may be able to enlarge some, not all.





Next: The father of street photography - Henri Cartier-Bresson.

My Photographic Inspiration #1

Josef Koudelka

Copyright - Magnum Photos

Of the thousands of photos I have taken over the last six months, nothing comes close to the emotion the Great Photographers were able to capture, from the simplest of Abstracts, to their incredible talent of making the photo tell a story. Josef Koudelka is one of my photographic heroes.

I continue to study and learn from the best, and only occasionally do I get it right.

Here's a few of my Koudelka favourites:

To Snow White and..

..the Seven million other people who posted pics of the Snow over Gauteng yesterday. I decided to wait a day and let the bandwagon pass before posting. Fashionably late, as they say.

It is the first time I've seen Snow in Johannesburg. Last Time, back in 1981, I was at Bekker school in Magaliesburg and missed it.

The Triangle of Death

My first attempt at You Tubing. Simple and straight forward. Let's hope I improve with time.

Monster Rising

My new position has kept me so bloody busy I clean forgot to celebrate my blog's 2nd birthday with a meaningful entry....and now i have absolutely nothing to say.

Ah well, the blog's gone from anger to frustration, and then progressed to some level of decency and again decended down to a level of total crap. But I'm not too bothered with that, because at the very least my blog cannot be blamed for falling into a rut. There's been articles on everything from politics to religion and self gratification to self pity. All aspects of life as we know it has been covered, and here and there an attempt has been made to lift certain individuals out of the gutter(self included).

I hope that those few followers whom have stuck with me have at the very least enjoyed a few articles,and I also hope I can lift the game a little over the next two years, so that there's some entertainment value.

Ciao, Chihuahua

PS: The above graphic was created using Jim Beam and Photoshop.

Osama B

No matter how much time you spend with a person, you never really get to know them, and although you think you do, you’ll never understand them.

There comes a time in any relationship, be it one of love or friendship, when a certain event shakes the very foundation of what you thought you knew about your friend or lover. This event, often has enough life changing atoms to either make or break the relationship. You find out a friend has been stealing from you, or your life partner has been burning the lover’s candle from both ends.

I was unfortunate to find myself in one of those situations a week ago. I remember the day clearly, because somehow on payday the fogginess that normally lurks at the fringes of my conscious mind lifts and I’m more alert than usual.
B was unusually quiet in the car from work and I knew something was amiss. About halfway home she must have realised that the subject which had her in such turmoil, had to be breached, and she let it out.

As she spoke and the signs of relief slowly smoothed over her beautiful face, so I absorbed, and what had pained her, slowly became visible on my face. The lines on my forehead had deepened, and the sadness that had cloaked her face previously, now ran its cold fingers across mine.

B had come into the crosshairs of the United States of America’s Secret Service. She was thought of in the same vein as Osama Bin Laden, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, almost anyone associated with Syria, and of course Mulla Omar.
She was considered a terrorist. All the worlds’ worst nightmares about car bombs, suicide bombers, snipers and hi-jacking, right here beside me, contained in the petite frame that was B.

Standard Bank had frozen all her accounts and debit orders, pending investigation. “Our hands are tied”, they tell her. I ask her if she didn’t watch the news, say, about two or three years ago? Our great esteemed leader, George W. Bush had issued executive orders that everyone in the free world had to reconfirm their personal details with their banks, including home address, identity documents and so forth.

“No”, she said. “You know I don’t watch the news.
As her boyfriend for three years, I understand where she’s coming from. B is too carefree and busy with life to bother about the woes of the world. She never watches the news and only buys a newspaper when I ask her to grab me the Sunday paper from the café around the corner. Even then she might only glance at the TV schedule for a few minutes. I envy her for that. I however, tend to get a bit annoyed when someone tells me something of importance in world politics that I’m not aware of, first.

So the two thousand and loose change B had in the bank made the red light go off in the White House, and now she can’t even pay the water bill. And as she mentions that to me, I also start relaxing. Because I know, it is times like these where couples have to stand together and fight off the forces of evil as one unit.

“They won’t get us my love, we’ll fight them till the bitter end”, I say to her, as we drive over the pollution-darkened hills of Johannesburg, and into the Sunset