Daniel Ho’s Musings

Here’s a video of one of my photographic heros that I found on YouTube. Enjoy!

Henri Cartier-Bresson “L’amour tout court” (“Just Plain Love” 2001)

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) was a French photographer considered to be the father of modern photojournalism, an early adopter of 35 mm format, and the master of candid photography. He helped develop the “street photography” style that has influenced generations of photographers that followed.

Trained as a painter, he began his career in photography in 1931 on a trip to the Ivory Coast. He was one of the first photographers to shoot in the 35mm format with a Leica camera, and helped to develop the photojournalistic “street photography” style that influenced generations of photographers to come.

It was there on the Côte d’Ivoire that he contracted blackwater fever, which nearly killed him. Returning to France, Cartier-Bresson recuperated in Marseille in 1931 and deepened his relationship with the Surrealists. He became inspired by a photograph by Hungarian photojournalist Martin Munkacsi

http://artneutre.bitacoras.com/imatge…

Cartier-Bresson said: “The only thing which completely was an amazement to me and brought me to photography was the work of Munkacsi. When I saw the photograph of Munkacsi of the black kids running in a wave I couldn’t believe such a thing could be caught with the camera. I said damn it, I took my camera and went out into the street.”

The photograph inspired him to stop painting and to take up photography seriously. He explained, “I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant.”. He acquired the Leica camera with 50 mm lens in Marseilles that would accompany him for many years. He described the Leica as an extension of his eye.

Cartier-Bresson is well known for his concept of the “decisive moment” in photography. He defined this moment as “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which gave that event its proper expression
During his photographic career Cartier-Bresson photographed all over the world – Mexico, Canada, USA, Europe, India, Burma, Pakistan, Indonesia, Africa, Burma, China, Japan, Cuba, and the USSR, among other places. He also photographed many famous personalities and artists of the 20th century, including Matisse, Picasso, Coco Chanel, Truman Capote, and Gandhi. His interest in the visual arts also extended to film – he made films with Jean Renoir, Jacques Becker and André Zvoboda and a documentary on Republican Spain (1937).

During the Second World War Cartier-Bresson was taken prisoner by the Germans and escaped, then photographed the occupation and liberation of France. During this time rumors reached the USA that he had been killed, and the Museum of Modern Art began to prepare a “posthumous” show. Cartier-Bresson later spent a year in the US helping to prepare this show.
In 1947 Cartier-Bresson co-founded the photographic cooperative Magnum along with fellow photographers Robert Capa, George Rodger, David Seymour, Bill Vandivert and others.

Valuing his anonymity as a tool for capturing decisive moments with his camera, Cartier-Bresson did not like to be photographed, and shot with a Leica camera which was smaller, quieter and less intrusive than other cameras.
Cartier-Bresson retired from photography in the early 1970s and by 1975 no longer took pictures other than an occasional private portrait; he said he kept his camera in a safe at his house and rarely took it out. He returned to drawing and painting. After a lifetime of developing his artistic vision through photography, he said, “All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.”

Cartier-Bresson is regarded as one of the art world’s most unassuming personalities. He disliked publicity and exhibited a ferocious shyness since his days in hiding from the Nazis during World War II. He hated to be photographed and treasured his privacy above all. Photographs of Cartier-Bresson do exist, but they are scant. When he accepted an honorary degree from Oxford University in 1975, he held a paper in front of his face to avoid being photographed. He did recall that he once confided his innermost secrets to a Paris taxi driver, certain that he would never meet the man again.
The Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation was created by Cartier-Bresson and his wife and daughter in 2002 to preserve and share his legacy.

http://www.henricartierbresson.org/

Image via Wikipedia

There’s a lot more to the environmental and social footprint of how we select the foods we eat than the distance from the farm to your fork. This articles talks about some of the issues.

How to measure the eco footprint of that bok choy on your own? With difficulty. A holistic odometer of pollutants and greenhouse gases would factor in not only the distance from producer to retailer, but also the miles from the fertilizer and pesticide factory to the farm, from the package factory to the food processor, and the miles travelled by empty trucks on their return trips after making these deliveries of fertilizer, pesticides, packaging and produce.

Add to this the miles travelled by the kitchen scraps to the landfill or green box composter, from the package recycling box to the recycling factory (often in Asia), and – usually the biggest energy load of all – the miles travelled by electricity to keep perishable food from spoiling in large freezers and refrigerators, many of them in supermarkets with doors open to warm air.

The reality is, the experts have different ways of calculating all this. It’s an inexact and oft-changing science. But the consensus seems to be that the distance travelled from farm to fork accounts for only 10 to 15 per cent of the total energy consumed in a complete food life cycle that stretches, as food miles guru Tim Lang puts it, from farm to fart.

The distance the food gets trucked also needs to be balanced with other measures of sustainability and social mindfulness. Local farms may not be sustainable and grow produce that needs to be heavily refrigerated. Yet distant farms may grow foods that are less energy intensive to ship and provide much needed income to the farmers in poorer countries.

Unless someone is prepared to make food choices the central issue of their life, we need some moderating guideline here. The 100-mile diet takes so much time and concentration, it can often become people’s only form of activism.

Read the entire article here.

Read the entire article here.

Over at FT, Tyler Brule pretty much ranted about what I’ve been thinking. What is it with this “new generation of attention-seeking, needy, overconfident, comfortable” graduates looking for jobs?

We have a pretty simple rule at our HQ concerning entry-level posts. Unless you have special qualifications or are coming into the business at a senior level, you start on reception.

If you can juggle multiple phone lines, organise bicycles to be sent to photo shoots in Spain, get journalists rebooked on oversold flights out of Nairobi, charm visitors, keep the front of house looking spotless, help the accounts department track receipts from hotels in Seoul, write firm but diplomatic e-mails to employees enforcing house rules and also wield trays of beverages hot and cold and remember who ordered what in a packed conference room then there’s a very good chance you’ll graduate from our finishing school and take up a post elsewhere in the company. Those who think such tasks are beneath them tend not to last too long.

So when intern season officially kicks off it’s always intriguing to hear how potential candidates view their assignments and life in the world of the working. Some recent gems from a round of interviews included: “I did an internship earlier and I was quite surprised that I was asked to help organise the library and file things”; “when I was at a creative agency earlier in the year I thought ‘let me have more input with the clients and do some writing’ but that didn’t happen, so that’s why I’m here”; “I don’t really want to help sort out other people’s stuff as I’d like to come here to work on my projects”; “before I start I just need to tell you about my summer travel plans and when I’ll need to take time off”.

I try to offer these interviewees a sympathetic and understanding smile and not write them off as a bunch of layabouts. I even resist the temptation to track down the article from the Christmas issue of The Economist that dissected the problems with this new generation of graduates (attention-seeking, needy, over-confident, comfortable). While there are always one or two that slip through the net and end up being something of a liability, we’ve also managed to find a couple of keepers who’ll stay on and rise through the ranks. People who don’t want to pitch in with a bit of heavy lifting, don’t know that Milan is a city in Italy and not Germany and are above offering decent service to clients, guests and colleagues need not apply.

Read the entire article here.