Category: How They Saw It

Chris Killip: Geography Photography – How They Saw It

He did not parachute in. That is the first thing to understand about how Chris Killip worked.

In Flagrante, his 1988 book documenting communities in the northeast of England, took roughly a decade to make. Killip moved to the region in the mid-1970s. He rented a flat. He got to know people. He came back. By the time the photographs existed as a book, he had spent more time with these communities than most journalists spend with any subject in a career.

How Saul Leiter Used Geography

Saul Leiter lived in the East Village for most of his adult life and photographed within walking distance of his apartment for most of his career. This was not a limitation. It was a method.

The East Village in the 1950s and 1960s was not a fashionable neighbourhood. It was dense, cheap, unglamorous, and full of the ordinary activity of people getting on with their lives. It had shop fronts with glass windows. It had wet pavements in winter. It had the particular light of a low-sun city at a northern latitude, arriving at shallow angles through gaps between buildings. Leiter understood what this geography made available and he stayed.

How Fan Ho Used Light

Fan Ho did not photograph Hong Kong. He photographed the light that passed through it.

The distinction matters. The streets of Kowloon and Sheung Wan in the 1950s and 1960s were full of photographers. Fan Ho was the one who understood that the city's narrow lanes and tall buildings were not a subject. They were a light delivery system. Everything that made Hong Kong visually distinctive - the density, the verticality, the compression of human life into tight spaces - was also a mechanism for producing light conditions that did not exist anywhere else in the world.

How Sebastião Salgado Used Geography

Sebastião Salgado photographs at the edges of the world. Not the geographical edges - though sometimes those too - but the edges where human labour meets human endurance, where people do things that the rest of the world prefers not to look at directly.

The gold mines of Serra Pelada. The oil fields of Kuwait after the Gulf War. The refugee camps of Rwanda and Sudan. The fishing villages of the North Atlantic. The cattle drives of Brazil. He has spent five decades going to places that are difficult to reach and difficult to be in, and making photographs there.

The geography is not incidental. It is the argument.

How Steve McCurry Used Light

Steve McCurry photographs in the golden hour the way other photographers breathe. Consistently, without apparent effort, as if the alternative had never occurred to him.

This is not a criticism. The golden hour is available to everyone and almost nobody uses it as well as McCurry. The warm, directional light of the hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset does specific things to the subjects he is interested in - faces, fabric, the architectural surfaces of South and Southeast Asia - and he has spent four decades understanding exactly what those things are.

How Garry Winogrand Used Geography

Garry Winogrand photographed America. Not a particular city, not a particular community, not a particular subject. America - the streets, the airports, the zoos, the parking lots, the women, the cars, the particular energy of a country that believed, for a while, that it was the most important place on earth.

He made around a million photographs. At his death in 1984 he left 2,500 undeveloped rolls of film. He had not seen a third of his own work.

How Ernst Haas Used Light

Ernst Haas was one of the first photographers to take colour seriously as a medium for serious work. This was not a popular position in 1953.

Life magazine published a colour essay by Haas that year - photographs of New York made with Kodachrome, saturated and deliberate, treating colour not as a record of how things looked but as the primary subject of the photograph. The response from the photography establishment was mixed. Colour was for advertising. Colour was for postcards. Haas ignored this and spent the next three decades making some of the most technically ambitious colour work of the twentieth century.

How Henri Cartier-Bresson Used Time of Day

Cartier-Bresson did not talk much about time of day. He talked about the decisive moment. These two things are more connected than they appear.

The decisive moment -- the instant at which form, content, and meaning align in a single frame - is not available at all hours equally. It requires light that has direction and quality. It requires people who are doing something rather than waiting for something. It requires a street that is alive rather than empty. These conditions do not occur at random. They cluster around particular hours, and Cartier-Bresson knew which ones.

How Martin Parr Used Weather

Martin Parr photographs the British on holiday in the rain and makes them look like the most interesting people in the world.

This is a specific skill. The British on holiday in the rain are not, objectively speaking, doing anything interesting. They are eating chips on a grey seafront, or sheltering under a transparent umbrella, or standing in a queue for something that has closed. Parr points a camera at them and the result is simultaneously funny, affectionate, and faintly devastating.

The weather is not incidental. It is the subject.

How Nan Goldin Used Light

Nan Goldin used flash. Not as a last resort. As a first choice.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, her landmark slideshow and eventual photobook documenting her life and the lives of her friends through the 1970s and 1980s, is lit almost entirely by direct on-camera flash. The light is flat, frontal, unforgiving. It bounces off walls and skin and the surfaces of cheap apartments and produces a quality of illumination that is specific to a particular kind of intimacy - the kind that happens late at night, indoors, between people who are not performing for anyone.