Word: camera
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...within camera range, Senator Bob Smith changed his seat from the third row to the second. The neatest desk belonged to Lott, fitting for a man who presses his shirts after they come back from the laundry. He's so efficient he called for a 15-min. break before poor Representative Ed Bryant had actually finished speaking. The press section, fearing that perhaps we were not witnessing the trial of the century, was relieved when Dominick Dunne, the reporter of record for the previous trial of the century, in Los Angeles, finally arrived...
...sexy pinpoints in the fog, 20th century floodlights over 19th century cobblestones, popguns of brightness in dark places that told dirty jokes about the naked city. As photographers elsewhere were doing--Josef Sudek in Prague, Bill Brandt in London--Brassai claimed as his territory the nocturnal city that camera and film technology was just then arriving at the means to capture...
...some of the people in pictures that look at first glance like candids. By the 1930s, photographers like Andre Kertesz and Henri Cartier-Bresson had begun to use the new 35-mm handheld Leicas, equipment that could capture fast movement. Brassai persisted in working with a Voigtlander Bergheil. A camera that used small glass plates instead of film--Brassai would eventually adapt it for conventional film--it required a tripod and long exposures. That in turn meant that his subjects usually knew they were being photographed. He had to get them to cooperate in the romantic comedies and melodramas...
...Brassai it wasn't always a matter of posing people so much as positioning his camera before them and waiting for them to assume the configurations he was looking for. What he wanted were archetypal scenes of Paris life in which the people were not caught in motion but in essence. Even in a picture of romantic treachery as subtly animated as Conchita with Sailors--there's a world of sexy waywardness in those spitcurl bangs alone--the people are as weighty and immemorial as Egyptian temple statues. And even when he made a picture in full daylit motion, like...
Brassai's graffiti pictures would be immensely influential among postwar artists like Jean Dubuffet and Antoni Tapies, who were sifting the rubble for a new imagery suited to a postapocalyptic world. Brassai would also make a considerable name for himself through his camera portraits of the artists and writers who were his friends, including Picasso, Miller, Matisse and Giacometti. But his greatest work will always be his views of nocturnal Paris. He made the night something...