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DMC 110

Published By: Bingham's Lens

A collection of visual ideas produced by the student artists of Western New Mexico University while working with adjunct faculty member, Tyler Bingham (Spring Semester 2012).

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Mia Alessandra

“Photography is a love affair with life.”
-Burk Uzzle




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Cindy Sanchez

A collection of visual ideas produced by the student artists of Western New Mexico University while working with adjunct faculty member, Tyler Bingham (Spring Semester 2012).

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Melissa Noce

“Photography is a love affair with life.”
-Burk Uzzle




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Henri Cartier-Bresson, Whose “Decisive Moment” Shaped Modern Photography

When Henri Cartier-Bresson first picked up a tiny Leica 35mm film camera in 1931, he began a visual journey that would revolutionize 20th-century photography.

His camera could be wielded so discreetly that it enabled him to photograph while being virtually unseen by others — a near invisibility that turned photojournalism into a primary source of information and photography into a recognized art form.

Cartier-Bresson’s concept of the “decisive moment” — a split second that reveals the larger truth of a situation — shaped modern street photography and set the stage for hundreds of photojournalists to bring the world into living rooms through magazines such as Life and Look. In 1947, he and Robert Capa helped create the photographer-owned cooperative photo agency Magnum.

Though he often focused on the human condition in his photographs, Cartier-Besson would often look at his contact sheets or prints upside down to judge the images separate from any social content. They stood as rigorous compositions on their own.

His signature shooting technique was to find a visually arresting setting for a photograph and then patiently wait for that decisive moment to unfurl. In his obituary in The New York Times in 2004 — Cartier-Bresson had died on Aug. 3 — the critic Michael Kimmelman noted that Cartier-Bresson was equally adept at responding instantly to changing circumstance.

“Photographers and others who saw him work talked about his swift and nimble ability to snap a picture undetected,” he wrote. “(Sometimes he even masked the shiny metal parts of his camera with black tape.) They also admired his coolness under pressure. The director Louis Malle remembered that, despite all the turmoil at the peak of the student protests in Paris in May 1968, Mr. Cartier-Bresson took photographs at the rate of only about four an hour.”

With the primacy of digital photography and social media in the 21st century, slow, painstaking image-making is becoming a relic. Photographers and their images now move at a pace as fast as the events swirling around them. Technological advances in cameras and methods of distribution have heralded in a new visual era, not unlike what Cartier-Bresson’s Leica did almost a century ago.

Photographs are no longer rare artifacts, nor primarily a means of learning about the exotic or unknown. They arrive instantaneously on our phones every day from every corner of the world and from all kinds of people. With a smart phone, everyone is a photographer, and images compete for crowd approval on social media channels like Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook.

Which raises questions on this anniversary of Cartier-Bresson’s death: Do these changes make a master’s carefully constructed images irrelevant? Or are they even more instructive today? Respond on Twitter using the hashtag #tellnyt.

By: James Estrin - From, "The New York Times"