Over the past four years, I have been exploring photography, both digital and analog. Most recently I have been learning about B&W film, including darkroom work, which I particularly enjoy. In addition to the technical, aesthetic, and historic elements of photography, I am interested in the social and philosophical facets as well.
I am working on a separate post about this aspect of photography, but in the meantime, here are several haiku on photographs and on famous photographers. As with my other haiku on this blog these follow a traditional structure: three lines, with the first and third lines comprising five syllables each and the second line seven syllables.
These three haiku reflect on family photographs.
Photographs we take
Children, landscapes, vacations
Are all self portraits
Tattered photographs
Ancestors look out at us
We will do that, too
Family photos
Albums filled with memories
Times lost forever
Here are some commentaries about five famous photographers.
Ansel Adams’ magnificent landscapes of the American West are part of our cultural heritage.
Ansel Adams knew
What Nature has to tell us.
God’s photographer.
Dorothea Lange’s photographs are testimony to the suffering and hardship so many endured during the Great Depression, particularly her iconic photo “Migrant Mother.”
Dorothea Lange,
Her camera a witness,
Showed us some hard truths.
Henri Cartier Bresson’s many photographs epitomize his concept of a photograph taken at the “decisive moment” to capture the essence of a scene or situation.
Camera in hand,
Cartier Bresson in mind,
The moment arrives.
Weegee was a pseudonym of a New York street photographer in the 1940s and 50s whose grainy, stark images documented the gritty and often violent life of the underclass.
Harsh reality:
Weegee and his Speed Graphic.
We become voyeurs.
Elliot Erwitt, although perhaps not as well-known as the other four, manifested a droll sense of humor in his photographs, particularly of dogs.
Elliott Erwitt,
Wry observer of the world.
His photos bring smiles.
Always nice to see Haiku work. Nice connections to the photographers. Black and white photography has an enduring legacy.
Thanks, Grant.
B&W film photography appeals to me because I can be involved in the entire process from composing and capturing the image with a camera, developing the film, and finally making the final print in the darkroom. Each step requires careful deliberation based on experience and knowledge, and the final product reflects a resonance between technology and craft. One can see that in the lovely photographs that are the legacy of past masters. Further, B&W film photography is enjoying a renascence, perhaps as a reaction to digital photography or to our increasingly technological world.
Digital photography would be ‘flying by wire’ if it were an airplane. There is an element between the printer and the print that controls the process, mathematically utilizing algorithms. I am a bi-plane pilot feeling all the feedback of the controls. You fly slower but you see more.