23 jul 2005 kl. 09.28 skrev Bob Talbot:
Thanks for the suggestion to look at Sieglitz's Steerage.
http://www.rps.org/book/stieglitz.html
Taken in 1907 with a plate camera it's clearly not a snapshot - did
the technology allow snapshots then?
I'd love to know how conspicuous the photographer was then. Could he
set up his tripod and bury his head under the cloth without people
responding to him? Were all those on the upper deck congregating
because news had spread a photographer was about to take a picture?
What would HE have looked like from where they were standing? I get
the impression a lot of people are looking at the camera.
Looking at the image I can see it's a classic. So much going on "a
busy image" in the words of a camera-club-judge. What of verticals
and who cares?. It didn't look slanted when I first looked - at least
not to my first impression - but the mast is probably upright wrt the
deck of the ship. Or maybe the whole boat is listing? Clearly it
didn't bother Sieglitz ... or maybe he only had one lens and this was
the only way to inclde both decks?
According to Stieglitz´own description, he saw the scene while
strolling the upper deck ("Steerage" means third-class travellers
without cabins, confined to a lower deck). He was without a camera,
but rushed to his cabin to get his Graflex, fearing that someone
(esp. that man with crossed white suspenders, and the one with a
white straw hat) would move and ruin the lines. When returning, no
one had moved a bit (guess you´d get lethargic crossing the Atlantic
under such circumstances), and he shot the scene free hand (quite a
feat with a Graflex on a ship at sea).
He states emphatically that it was the lines and planes in the scene
that made him think of a cubist painting (he was instrumental in
introducing modern European art in the U.S., so he knew it when he
saw it), and made him shoot the scene.
<And the image is cropped *exactly* where it should be. This
one even gets me to think of Sieglitz´ Steerage: only looks casual
until you start to see the structure.>
Well, having looked up "Steerage" I'm not sure I can see that much
connection. One is a classic, the other just a moment. Sure, it's
cropped, but that's possibly where the similarity ends ...
Bob
OK, to me the connection was just the use of lots of more or less
incidental lines to build a structure. In Bob´s case, they are
mainly diagonals, while Stieglitz used them to split the image plane
into fragments. In either case, the structure may not be apparent to
a casual viewer, and possibly not even to the photographer himself at
the time, but possibly it was a subconscious part of what made Bob
1) take off the lens cap
2) lift the camera
3) press the shutter
instead of just passing by, as many of us probably would have done,
while out "looking for subjects to photograph"...
