Cartier-Bresson: la grand hypocrite

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Fascinating anecdote in The Online Photographer blog about an encounter with Henri Cartier-Bresson.

I had expected to encounter the gentle soul of a poet. Instead, the quirky man to whom I was introduced was edgier than I could ever have imagined, possessed of a sharply caustic intellect that, I realize in retrospect, might actually have been calculated to put people off—or perhaps just people like me. He was, I’d been told, an aristocrat. He talked of his growing frustration with (or maybe it was disdain for) photography, and his concomitant need to return to his roots: drawing and painting, the few examples of which I’d seen had left me cold, left me wondering how a great master in one field would fail so completely to recognize his mediocrity in another. But no matter. If Henri Cartier-Bresson chose to be full of himself, I was sure he’d earned the right. Genius is as genius does.

At one point, a young man with a Nikon F appeared at the open door. I paid him little mind; at ICP, one regularly encountered young people carrying cameras, all eagerly shooting each other’s nooks and crannies as they earnestly went about learning how to make incisive pictures. But this fellow was different; he seemed barely out of his teens—if indeed he was—and he appeared to be genuinely starstruck. It is not often one gets to meet one’s true-life hero in the flesh.

“Monsieur Cartier-Bresson,” the young man exclaimed in what sounded like his best prep-school French as he brought his Nikon to his eye, moved in and squeezed off a series of exposures with, I think, a 105mm lens. At the last ka-thunk of the mirror, Cartier-Bresson sprung to his feet, literally sprung as if his wiry body had been coiled tight, just waiting for a reason to release itself.

“You must not photograph me!” he shrieked, his English suddenly crystal-clear. “No one is allowed to photograph me! Everyone must know that…”

The kid apologised and withdrew, but C-B pursued him.

Such a show of respect was apparently too little, too late for Cartier-Bresson, whose face by now was beet-red. He chased the young man out the doorway into into a corridor, screaming at the top of his lungs that without his cherished cloak of anonymity he could not continue to go unnoticed among the people of the world. Encumbered by fame and celebrity, how could he photograph freely? He would be recognized at every turn.

My final mental image of the sad turn of events is of a raging Frenchman having a full-out tantrum, his arms waving, his charged body literally jumping up and down, his intense eyes suddenly turned wild, right in the face of this by-now completely humiliated and defenseless young man who, at first backed against a wall, now slid down to the floor, his body sobbing, his trembling hand reaching out, if memory serves, to offer what I took to be a partially exposed roll of film as penance.

I could not help but reflect on all those unsuspecting individuals whose identities, whose very souls, had been captured, dissected even, by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s revealing eye.

I think that’s unnecessarily generous. Cartier-Bresson made a handsome living, and established a great artistic reputation, mainly by photographing people without their permission — in many cases immortalising their fallibility. Think, for example, of those guys he photographed peeing against a wall. Or the couples picnicking by the banks of the Marne. Much though I love his work, if he’d tried that hysterical act on me I’m afraid I’d have been tempted to tell him to go f*** himself. And photographed him as he did so.

The Republican conspiracy

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If, like me, you are puzzled by the anti-democratic obduracy of the Republicans in the US Senate, then this post by Mark Anderson may strike a chord.

As I have watched the first year of the current administration unfold, I have increasingly wondered if all of this, at a thirty thousand foot level, is a result of a simple GOP plan first outed long ago, and spoken of frequently during the Bush Era. Called “starve the beast,” it is a much-discussed strategy of spending the US into oblivion while in power, so that the following party has no dry ammunition with which to carry out its programs. Carried further, it suggests a gluttony of spending while in power, so that services, and the government itself, is forced into contraction.

The last administration spent more money from current funds, and indebted us more deeply into the future, than any in history. Was it all just bad management and fake wars? Or was it as intellectually simple and negative as the current GOP refusal to vote for any single bill? It’s a simple strategy. Did it work?

Me no Leica this Leica*

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Very useful DP Review of the new Leica compact. It concludes:

The biggest problem when drawing a final conclusion on the X1 is of course the typical Leica price tag – this is the most expensive compact camera on the market by a huge margin. It faces strong competition too, with the availability now of other, more flexible small cameras namely the Panasonic GF1 and the Olympus Pen twins at a significantly lower price level. These Micro Four Thirds cameras are all faster and more responsive in use, and of course have the advantage that they can be fitted with an array of different lenses. Particularly relevant to this comparison is the excellent Panasonic Lumix G 20mm F1.7 ASPH, which negates one of the X1’s greatest strengths – its high ISO image quality – by gathering a stop and a half more light than the X1’s F2.8 Elmarit. This allows a GF1 user to set at least a stop lower ISO at any given light level, equalizing out the difference between the sensors; and for static subjects at least, an Olympus owner can take advantage of in-body image stabilization to use a lower ISO still.

So what, if not low-light image quality, is left in favor of spending $2000 on the X1? The traditional-style control layout will certainly appeal very strongly to some, the near-silent leaf-shutter can be a distinct advantage over the louder focal-plane shutters in the Micro Four Thirds cameras for some uses, and the lighter weight isn’t to be totally dismissed. No doubt for some users these advantages will be sufficient reason to buy, but for the majority of photographers, it's impossible not to conclude that, despite the X1’s charms, a Pen or a GF1 would be a more sensible option.

* With apologies to Dorothy Parker (or perhaps Walter Kerr?)

Google turns to the spooks

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I know that cloud computing is wonderful, etc. but have you noticed this development?

Just the thought is enough to send an involuntary little shiver up your spine: Google — keeper of a vast repository of data on our activities, interests and connections — working hand-in-hand with the National Security Agency — the top-secret electronic surveillance specialists who have been known to go rogue from time to time. But according to sources who spoke to the Washington Post, there are delicate talks now going on to form such a partnership with the goal of fortifying Google’s defenses against the kind of espionage-oriented hacking attacks launched from China against it and dozens of other U.S. companies in December.

Google reportedly approached the NSA shortly after the attacks, but in an indication of the sensitivity of such arrangement, the talks have been going on for weeks. Reports the Post: “Google and the NSA declined to comment on the partnership. But sources with knowledge of the arrangement, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the alliance is being designed to allow the two organizations to share critical information without violating Google’s policies or laws that protect the privacy of Americans’ online communications. The sources said the deal does not mean the NSA will be viewing users’ searches or e-mail accounts or that Google will be sharing proprietary data.” What the agency would be do, as it has with other corporations, is help Google evaluate hardware and software vulnerabilities and gauge the sophistication of its attackers.

At face value, it all sounds reasonable, especially given the suspicions of state support for the Chinese hacking, but of the many things the NSA can tap, a deep reservoir of public trust is not one.

Amen.

The FT’s Gideon rachman spent the morning at the International Institute for Strategic Studies’s briefing on their annual survey of the ‘Military Balance’. He reports that

The briefing offered by the IISS experts ranged fascinatingly over a variety of topics from the Iranian nuclear programme, to Russia’s new military doctrine and the links (or lack of them) between al-Qaeda and Iran.

But the thing I found most interesting was the confirmation that cyber-security is the hot issue of the day. John Chipman, the head of the IISS, says the institute is about to launch a special study of cyber-security which raises all sorts of fascinating issues about hard power, about the responsibilities of states and about international law. What if a country’s infrastructure could be destroyed as effectively by a cyber-attack, as by an invasion of tanks? How do you defend against that? How do you identify the culprits? And what does international law have to say about the issue – might we have to revise our definitions of what constitutes an act of war? Chipman argues, plausibly, that we are now at an equivalent period to the early 1950s. Just as strategists had to devise whole new doctrines to cope with the nuclear age, so they willl have to come up with new ideas to cope with the information age.

And over at the Guardian Charles Arthur has an exhaustive (or should that be exhausting?) analysis of whether the UEA Climate Research Unit’s emails were hacked. His conclusion:

After the July incident, perhaps CRU failed to batten down the hatches, either through technical failings or because someone inside was subverting the efforts. So what happened in November?

Rotter blogged his theory last year. “In the past I have worked at organisations where the computer network grew organically in a disorganised fashion. Security policies often fail as users take advantage of shortcuts … one of these is to share files using an ftp server … This can lead to unintentional sharing with the rest of the internet.”

He added that files were perhaps put “in an ftp directory which was on the same central processing unit as the external webserver, or even worse, was on a shared driver somewhere to which the webserver had permissions to access. In other words, if you knew where to look, it was publicly available”.

If this hypothesis turns out to be true, UEA may end up looking foolish. For there will be no one to arrest.

In other words, the cock-up theory of history rules ok.

Through a lens, darkly

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This shows what happens when a Nikon F2 is hit by an AK47 bullet. It’s one of the images in a major retrospective of the work of the war photographer Don McCullin, and is a pretty good testimonial to the build quality of the brand. There’s a vivid slideshow of some of the pictures from the exhibition here. Each one is unforgettable. McCullin is one of the age’s truly great photographers, but it’s impossible to avoid the impression that his life’s work has taken a terrible toll on him. He sometimes wears an inexpressibly sad expression.

The uses of processed wood pulp

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There was a good deal of ballyhoo a while back when Amazon announced a deal with some fancy Ivy League schools (like Princeton) to give students free Kindles preloaded with textbooks. Well, guess what? According to The Daily Princetonian, things haven’t gone according to the Bezos script.

Less than two weeks after 50 students received the free Kindle DX e-readers, many of them said they were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices.

On Wednesday, the University revealed that students in three courses — WWS 325: Civil Society and Public Policy, WWS 555A: U.S. Policy and Diplomacy in the Middle East, and CLA 546: Religion and Magic in Ancient Rome — were given a new Kindle DX containing their course readings for the semester. The University had announced last May it was partnering with Amazon.com, founded by Jeff Bezos ’86, to provide students and faculty members with the e-readers as part of a sustainability initiative to conserve paper.

But though they acknowledged some benefits of the new technology, many students and faculty in the three courses said they found the Kindles disappointing and difficult to use.

“I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool,” said Aaron Horvath ’10, a student in Civil Society and Public Policy. “It’s clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.”

Horvath said that using the Kindle has required completely changing the way he completes his coursework.

“Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” he explained. “All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.”

One professor, Stan Katz, who teaches Horvath’s class, said he is interested in whether he “can teach as effectively in using this as in using books and E-Reserve material and in whether students can use this effectively,” adding that “the only way to find out is to try it.” One of Katz’ main concerns is whether students can do close reading of the texts with the new device.

“I require a very close reading of texts. I encourage students to mark up texts, and … I expect them to underline and to highlight texts,” Katz explained. “The question is whether you can do them as effectively with a Kindle as with paper.”

eReaders are a classic case of a technological solution looking for a problem. They are useful for some purposes — like avoiding RyanAir baggage fees. But they’re not a general-purpose solution to every reading need. The most interesting thing about the Princeton experience is that it rather punctures the widespread assumption that eReaders would at least be good for disrupting the expensive textbook market.

Tokyo asks Toyota to investigate Prius

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Hmmm…wonder if my local dealer knows about this. Just in from CNN — Tokyo asks Toyota to investigate Prius – CNN.com.

Tokyo, Japan (CNN) — Toyota's consumer woes deepened on Wednesday, and for the first time on native soil.

Japan's Transportation Ministry has asked Toyota to investigate brake malfunction complaints in Japan on its Prius, the gasoline-electric hybrid car which was the best-selling vehicle in the country in 2009, according to the Japan Automobile Dealers Association.

Ministry officials said 14 complaints regarding brakes in the new Prius model has been filed since July. Toyota officials said the Prius has received similar complaints from North American car dealers and that the company is investigating.

And now, ladies and gents, for Mr Jobs’s next trick — the MacPad

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Hmmm… This from Good Morning Silicon Valley.

Thought you were done hearing rumors about the tablet Apple is secretly developing? No such luck. Less than a week after the iPad was unveiled, there is already talk that a larger, more versatile sibling is in the works. Mind you, it’s just talk — a thinly sourced tidbit relayed by TechCrunch with the requisite grain of salt and appropriate hedging. But the gist of it is that Apple is well along on a second tablet with Intel inside, a screen possibly as large as 15.4 inches, and, instead of the iPhone OS, a version of Mac OS X, making for a more open device. MG Siegler suggests we keep an eye on Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June to see if Apple offers a peek at the upcoming OS X 10.7. Should the new version include some significant multitouch features, he says, that would bolster prospects for a more Mac-like tablet.

Actually, they could just rip the screen off my MacBook Air and use that.