CONTACTS, COLOUR...

At the William Klein exhibition at Tate Modern they showed the film Contacts and it has stayed with me ever since. William Klein narrates as he goes through his contact sheets:

A picture is taken at 125th of a second. What do you know of a photographer's work? 100 pictures, let's say 125. Well, it's a body of work. That comes to, all told, one second. Let's say more like 250 photographs. That would be a rather large body of work. And that would come out to 2 seconds. The life of a photographer, even of a great photographer they say: two seconds. 

Genius. {Here's a very old blog post about when I kind of 'met' William Klein.}\

On Sunday I went to see Henri Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour at Somerset House. It wasn't what I expected at all: 10 of the photographs were by Cartier-Bresson - the rest of the exhibition set out to disprove HCB's assertion in the 1950s that colour photography could never live up to black and white. I was particularly excited about the colour works by Saul Leiter and Joel Meyerowitz included in the exhibition.

Saul Leiter

Joel Meyerowitz

{Both exhibitions continue into January 2013. If you're in London, they're worth a visit.}