Reader’s Diary

Annie Leibovitz

People who only know Annie Leibovitz’s “Vanity Fair” work might dismiss her as an illustrator who uses vast resources to stage meaningless set pieces.  For those people “Annie Leibovitz at Work” will be a revelation because it covers the whole arc of her career back to her brilliant work for “Rolling Stone”.  Her older work is so much more interesting and so much more real that her elaborate recent work pales in comparison.

In the book Leibovitz writes in detail about photos and photo essays from her entire career.  The stories are always interesting, but what struck me was that each contains some of her hard-earned experience.  This is a book that photographers can learn from.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson isn’t known for his writing, but there are some gems in this small collection.  To me the most interesting was the reprinted introduction to his book “The Decisive Moment”.  The phrase is such a cliche that to read it in it’s original form is somewhat surprising.  For the “moment” Cartier-Bresson defines so elegantly is not – only or necessarily – the peak of the action, but the moment at which the photograph’s formal composition is perfect and complete.  Cartier-Bresson is not merely speaking of the hunt for the defining journalistic instant, but of the hunt for what he calls geometry.

The book also contains some interesting comments about portraiture and about color.  Cartier-Bresson’s objection to color photography was not that it was intrinsically inferior to black-and-white, but that what we now call “analog” photographic processes didn’t give him control over color.