The Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art is holding a retrospective of the French photographer’s work until August. They have a large collection of photographs on display, and while I don’t know a lot about street photography or photo-journalism, I was impressed by many of them. If I were to try to describe what I see, they:
- are exclusively about people
- often interacting with their environment, and vice versa
- often interacting with each other
- often reacting to a situation, or expressing a clear point of view
- often have a strong sense of space and shape, that relates directly to the human subject(s)
- often exquisitely, perfectly timed, freezing the decisive action or moment of the scene being played out
- sometimes remind me of a Norman Rockwell painting, in the way humor is found through incongruity and juxtaposition (the word humanity also springs to mind)
Or if I were to put it another way, what he does for me, is capture succintly, people simply being people. Even in his commissioned portraits, his subjects rarely look directly at the camera, so that the final result feels more like one of his street shoots.