People crossing

From series Crossing, San Francisco, August 2007.



Can anything be more painfully mundane than crossing the street? It's not even an event or a moment worth recalling (unless you get hit by a bus). Still I find myself crouched in corners of pavements maniacally snapping picture after picture of people crossing the street. They eyeball me with baffled curiosity - what is he doing? - and I take their picture in mid-step.


I like to photograph my pedestrians right before twilight, when the late afternoon light is harsh. The light blinds their eyes like a spotlight and illuminates their faces like actors on an asphalt stage. I like the split second between waiting and crossing, right after the green light signals them to move. Inertia and action. At rest, their faces look to the sun; the signal turns green, and they all bow to watch their step.

Sometimes I squeeze myself into a passing crowd to take pictures upclose. I cross the street back and forth with the camera against my chest, and press the shutter blind. Seldom do I foresee the result; usually I get throwaways. But once in a while serendipity smiles and out comes a picture I like, a group portrait of city dwellers in a rush. The subjects' brows are furrowed, their hands are clutched securely around their purses. They are harried, annoyed, their hair swept up by speed. They look real.


Back at the curb, a solitary man waits for the light to change. Another person joins him, then another, then yet another. Soon there is a row of people on the curb, a chorus line, a group shot. Stitched together in a series, a pedestrian Christmas tree. Photographs take the ordinariness out of the mundane for a very simple reason: people are interesting.

At the end of the day

Group Center, San Francisco, April 2008.



I'm an end-of-the-day photographer. On my way home I take pictures of people on their way home. Five o'clock light is a harsh and blinding spotlight that makes huddled pedestrians look like bas relief. Backlit, the same light portrays them as the urban warriors they truly are, the shadows as long as the day that is about to end. An hour later, the light softens to cast a golden glow on everything -- magic hour it is called -- magic to the photographer and magic to everyone else because it conjures the promise of rest.

But before rest comes the commute; I photograph that too. Light pierces the descent underground and transforms a man's head into a ghostly apparition. The same head is multiplied three times in reflections and shadow, a hydra retreating to its cave.

The train ride home brings close encounters in closed quarters. If the morning commute is lively with chatter and the rustle of newspapers, the late afternoon commute is marked by pensiveness and hunched shoulders. For those who are seated, it is a time to recharge. For those who stand body-to-body on the aisle, the commute is long and the temper is short; let no man be a jackass and let this train keep running or else. Taking pictures inside the train is a stealth operation (I will not be that jackass). I am careful even though everyone is too exhausted to care. Most of the time I don't even bother to take out my Leica. I just want to get home, say hello to my wife in the garden, make coffee, have my second cigarette of the day, and read The Huffington Post online.

Taken Today

Untitled, San Francisco, June 2009.

Day for night

Untitled, San Francisco, August 2007.

In cinematography, "day for night" refers to shooting night scenes during the day in order to avoid the expense and hassle of filming at night. With this technique, day is made to simulate night with the use of filters, old film stock, underexposure, and other sorts of tweaks. "Day for Night" is also the title of a hilarious film by François Truffaut about everything that could go wrong while shooting a movie, a must-see for film lovers.

These dark pictures resemble night scenes, but they were actually shot in late afternoon daylight when San Francisco light is at its harshest. The trick, which works best in uneven lighting conditions, is achieved by metering exposure against the brightest part of the frame. This underexposes the other elements or turns them completely black. When subjects enter the bright light, they are perfectly exposed. The light sets apart their faces and gestures from the rest of the scene, as if lit by a strobe, albeit, a natural one.

. . . but it's blurry!

Untitled, Oakland, October 1997.

Conventional wisdom would tell us that in order for a picture to be good, it has to be as sharp as a tack. In Internet forums, photo enthusiasts split hairs over sharpness and how much noise is acceptable in a picture. The desirability of digital cameras rises and falls by how noisy they get at high ISOs. In the face of all this obsession with crystal clarity, whither the blurry shot? The trash bin?

Hello. My name is Eman and I like blurry pictures.

Pictures come out blurry for many reasons: the thing itself moves too fast, the photographer moves too slow, not enough light, too much light, the camera shakes, the eager hand shakes, the lens can be better. In short, shooting conditions are not ideal. But unless you're in a studio or (God forbid) shoot with a flash, street conditions cannot always be ideal.

Perhaps a better gauge of a good picture is its power for storytelling, whether the stories are intended or not. In this context, blurriness to me would suggest that the thing itself is not a still life; that it moves and breathes, that the moment captured will be followed by another moment and yet another one.

Czech photographer Antonin Kratochvil is a Magnum correspondent who occasionally shoots celebrity portraits for magazines. Unlike other celebrity photographers who work with an army of assistants and an armada of gear, Kratochvil shoots his portraits in the same way that he would cover a war -- alone, with a hand-held camera, and with natural light. His blurry portrait of Rod Steiger (below) may not be flattering, but its dynamism and mask-like countenance reveal more of Steiger's qualities as an actor than any technically perfect shot.

The faces in the pictures by Miguel Rio Branco and Flor Garduño below can barely be gleaned from the blurriness that results from shooting under low light. This "flaw" renders the subjects anonymous, but it also imbues them with universality, a metaphorical significance that would be absent otherwise.

The unintentional blur in Raymond Depardon's portrait of his mother becomes the central focus of the picture itself, transforming the subject into a spectral image that intimates suggestions of memory and mortality.

Before trashing your next blurry picture, look at it again; it may possess qualities that make it worth keeping. When it comes to "interestingness," a little blur can be your friend.



















Antonin Kratochvil, Rod Steiger, Prague, 1998.
Antonin Kratochvil, George Clooney.
Miguel Rio Branco, El Cabrero, Sevilla, 1993.
Miguel Rio Branco, Coconuts to Be, Cartagena, 1990.
Flor Garduño, Santiago, Temalacatzingo, Mexico, 1987.
Flor Garduño, Yatiri, Isla del Sol, Bolivia, 1991.
Raymond Depardon, During the four-minute exposure my mother moved slightly, 1984.

fa-fa-fa-fa-fashion

Untitled, San Francisco, April 2009.



The street is a stage but it's also a runway for street fashion. In big cities around the world, young people make bold, personal statements with the way they dress themselves everyday; unwittingly they influence the direction of couture and mainstream fashion itself (consider the candy-colored denizens of Tokyo's Harajuku station or skateboard culture, which single-handedly rescued Vans from sneaker oblivion). Perhaps no other photographer has documented street fashion longer than New York Times contributor Bill Cunningham. Since the 1950s, Cunningham has been documenting real fashion in uptown and downtown New York City, first for the Daily News and later in the 70s for the Times.

Irving Penn said that "a fashion picture is a portrait; just as a portrait is a fashion picture." Fashion photographers are to our century the way studio painters like Van Eyck, Goya, Rembrandt or Sargent were to theirs, image makers of celebrity and high society. There is one difference: unlike portrait paintings of yore, the fashion portrait is not elitist. It is not created for the satisfaction of the model; it is made for us, the masses, to fuel our desire and entice us to consume.

Fashion has attracted the world's best image makers. The fashion portfolios of Avedon, Scavullo, Horst, Guy Bourdin, and Irving Penn contain their most memorable work. Documentary photographers like Lartigue, Jeanloup Sieff, Antonin Kratochvil, Bruce Gilden, and Mary Ellen Mark have stepped out of their comfort zones to work for fashion magazines. Even art photographers like Nan Goldin, Phillip-Lorca di Corsia, Juergen Teller, and Sam Taylor-Wood have shot for W and Vogue.

The most sought after photographers of today all have distinct signature styles and are as famous as the designers they work for: Mert & Marcus, Corinne Day, Mario Sorrenti, Steven Meisel, Mario Testino, Terry Richardson, Steven Klein, Paola Kudacki, Bruce Weber.They draw inspiration from many sources: the classicism of their predecessors, cinema, art, even pornography. They push the limits of technology and the buttons of public sensitivity, courting controversy with provocative imagery.

My personal favorite among them is Italian photographer Paolo Roversi, whose gossamer-light images recall the soft-focus portraiture of Victorian era studios. "I have a very mystical and spiritual approach to photography," he says, "which I can't explain, and I don't need to. I like to keep things unrevealed, I like sometimes to lose myself in the indefinite."


VIDEO: Paolo Roversi on his process (in French).


VIDEO: David Bowie, "Fashion".






















































Paolo Roversi, Kirsten, London, 1988.
Paolo Roversi, Guinevere, Paris, 1996.
Paolo Roversi, Tilda, Paris, 1996.
Paolo Roversi, Naomi, Paris, 1994.
Steven Meisel, CK One ad campaign, 1994.
Steven Klein, Larry Clark and the cast of Kids, 2002.
Mert & Marcus, Malgosia in McQueen, London, 2006.
Corinne Day, Kate, 2001.
Mario Sorrenti, Kate Moss, 1993.