Styles / Street & snapshot
French humanist photography
- Key: the open sky, all around and above, soft.
- Lamp in the scene: a lamp, sign or screen, from the camera’s left, at the side, hard.
Open shadows: bright surroundings (walls, ground, sky) fill them; no reflector needed. Haze: fog or mist, or a haze machine indoors.
Schematic, not to scale: worked out from the style’s choices. No set-up of this style has been rendered yet.
The photographs that define it are still in copyright, so they are linked below rather than shown.
Black-and-white pictures of ordinary people in the streets, cafés, riverbanks and working-class districts of Paris and its suburbs, made with small handheld cameras in available light and published in illustrated magazines from the 1930s to the 1960s. The photographer waits, unnoticed, for the instant when gesture and setting meet: lovers, children at play, a man leaping a puddle, the city under street lamps at night. The tone is affectionate and often funny; some famous pictures were quietly set up.
How the look is made
- Walk the streets, bistros, fairs and suburbs and photograph ordinary people living their day.
- Use a small camera with a normal lens at eye level, and stay unnoticed.
- Wait for the instant when a gesture and the geometry of the place come together, and release then.
- Look for warmth and wit rather than misery or spectacle: lovers, children, workers at rest.
- Work in available light: soft grey daylight by day, street lamps and fog by night, and flash only when there is nothing else.
- Print the whole frame in soft, full greys, made for a magazine page.
Shoot sheet for your kit
Fill in your camera, lenses and lights, and the sheet says which light plays each part, what to work around and where to start on your camera. Without a kit it starts on a full-frame camera.
Light
Key: the open sky, all around and above, soft.
Lamp in the scene: a lamp, sign or screen, from the camera’s left, at the side, hard.
- Open shadows: bright surroundings (walls, ground, sky) fill them; no reflector needed.
- Haze: fog or mist, or a haze machine indoors.
- Shadow edges
- Shadows that fade gradually from light to dark, cast by a large or diffused light: a window, a softbox, a cloudy sky.
- Shadow depth
- Shadows kept light and full of detail by a reflector, a fill light, bounce or bright surroundings (a low lighting ratio, up to about 3:1: the shadow side at most a stop and a half darker).
How the style is lit
- Soft grey overcast daylight in the street, no fill.
- Street lamps, lit windows and fog at night, exposed for seconds.
- Whatever light a bistro, dance hall or fairground has, rarely flash.
This plan is worked out from the style’s choices, so it is drawn as a schematic. One way to get the light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.
Lens and settings
Start at
On a full-frame camera: the same depth of field and exposure as the style’s own numbers, in the same light. Then meter and adjust.
- 1/15 s: on a tripod.
- Then
- 40–50 mm · f/2.8–f/11 · 1/500–4 s · ISO 50–400 on full frame, inferred from the gear and the look. Cartier-Bresson's Leica with a 50 mm lens, Rolleiflexes at waist level (75 mm, about 41 mm equivalent) and Brassaï's 6 × 9 cm Voigtländer on a tripod, where café light needed 3–4 s or more. Daylight at f/5.6–f/11 and 1/125–1/500 s, and wider stops indoors, are inferred.
- Focal length
- Roughly the eye’s own perspective; no visible distortion.
- Angle
- The camera at the height of a standing person or of the subject.
- Distance
- Whole figures and their immediate surroundings.
- Balance
- The subject placed off-centre, balanced against open space.
- Crop & fill
- The subject shown small within its setting, which explains it.
- Depth
- Separate events in the foreground, middle ground and background. Doors, windows, mirrors or arches frame the subject again.
- Instant
- Gesture and geometry peak together in one instant.
Direct
Not posed: passers-by walk, lovers embrace on a pavement or a bench, children play and leap, workers rest and talk, all at ease and absorbed in their own day, seldom looking at the camera, faces calm or lit by a small smile. A scene that is set up is played to look found, as if caught mid-stride.
- Body position
- Caught or posed in mid-step, one foot lifted, clothes swinging.
- Head & gaze
- Attention on what the hands are doing or on a thing (working, reading, eating, playing), not on the camera.
- Line & energy
- Loose and unforced, as people stand and sit when they forget the camera, whether caught or coaxed by prompts.
- Several people
- People holding, hugging, kissing, leaning on or carrying one another. People talking, playing, working or dancing together, absorbed in each other rather than the camera.
- The moment
- People photographed as they are, unaware or unconcerned.
Style the set
Nothing is styled: people wear their own everyday clothes (berets, caps, aprons, overcoats, Sunday best on a holiday) in their own streets, cafés, courtyards and riverbanks; when a scene is set up, the actors keep ordinary clothes and a real street so that it still looks found.
- Clothes
- What people happened to be wearing; nothing chosen for the picture.
- Set & props
- A real home, workplace or street that belongs to the people in it, not a set, with their own things and traces of use.
- How much is styled
- Nothing dressed, made up, moved or added for the picture.
Finish
- Monochrome
- Rich blacks, clean whites and every grey between. Low contrast and gentle greys.
- Film
- A small handheld camera: quick, mobile, grainy when pushed. Roll film in a medium-format camera, often square.
- Post-production
- Nothing changed beyond exposure and development.
- Shown as
- Each picture stands on its own.
- Shown in
- Pictures made for magazine pages and spreads. The book as the main form of the work.
Stay away from confrontational, deadpan, composite & montage, saturated colour, tilted angle, fully art-directed, studio backdrop and full glamour make-up.
Before you shoot it
These are real people photographed in public, often recognisable, sometimes children; France recognises a right to one's image, and in 1992 a couple who believed they were Doisneau's kissers sued him (the claims were dismissed in 1993). Several celebrated 'candid' pictures were set up. The photographs are in copyright: credit the photographers and their estates or agencies.
Where to see it
From open collections, shown whole with their credits. Later photographs are linked, not shown, while they are in copyright.
In copyright, so linked
- Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris , Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1932, printed ca. 1970s. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).
- Le Baiser de l'hôtel de ville, Paris , Robert Doisneau, 1950. Boca Raton Museum of Art (on Google Arts & Culture).
- Paris , Sabine Weiss, 1949. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).
- City island, Paris at night , Brassaï, ca. 1930. Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive (on Google Arts & Culture).
With other styles
The opposite: New York street photography. Keep the humanists' level 50 mm frame and their warmth, or tilt, widen and sour it as the New York school did; pick one side, because mixing them blurs both.
Pairs with Surrealist photography. Its eye for uncanny coincidence sharpens the humanist instant: look for a poster that echoes a passer-by or a reflection that doubles a gesture.
The opposite: FSA/OWI documentary photography. FSA pictures gather rural evidence with captions for reform; choose the humanist approach when the brief wants affection and wit in the city rather than a case.
Sources
- Humanist photography, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanist_photography (France 1930–1960 as a historical movement; everyday subjects; magazines Vu, Regards, Point de vue, Paris Match, Picture Post, Life, Réalités; Leica, Rolleiflex at waist level, Ermanox, Contax; available light; Groupe des XV 1946–1957; Five French Photographers, MoMA 1951–52; decline as television displaced magazines in the late 1960s)
- Photographie humaniste, Wikipédia: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photographie_humaniste (emerged about 1930 in working-class Paris and suburbs, flourished 1945–1960; Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Ronis, Izis, Boubat, Brassaï; commissioned prints studied and retouched in the laboratory)
- Henri Cartier-Bresson, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Cartier-Bresson (Leica with 50 mm lens and black tape; Images à la sauvette 1952; the decisive moment; Surrealists at Café Cyrano; Magnum 1947; uncropped prints with black border; flash 'impolite')
- Robert Doisneau, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Doisneau (Rapho; Vogue from 1948; Le Baiser in Life 12 June 1950; La Banlieue de Paris 1949 with Cendrars; irony and children's street culture)
- Le Baiser de l'hôtel de ville, Wikipédia: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Baiser_de_l%27h%C3%B4tel_de_ville (staged with two paid drama students, Françoise Delbart and Jacques Carteaud; lawsuits of 1992, dismissed 1993, upheld 1996 and 1999)
- Le Basier [sic] de L'Hotel de Ville, Paris, Boca Raton Museum of Art on Google Arts & Culture: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/le-basier-de-l-hotel-de-ville-paris-robert-doisneau/rgEf9FnkCCusUg (Doisneau composed and planned pictures, waiting for moments or setting them up)
- Brassaï, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassa%C3%AF (Paris de nuit, Arts et Métiers Graphiques 1933, text by Paul Morand; tutored by André Kertész)
- Willy Ronis, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy_Ronis (Rapho 1946; first French photographer to work for Life; Nu provençal 1949; Belleville-Ménilmontant, Arthaud 1954; Five French Photographers at MoMA)
- André Kertész, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Kert%C3%A9sz (Leica from 1928; Vu; Film und Foto, Stuttgart 1929; Cartier-Bresson: 'We all owe him a great deal' — the link from the New Vision to the humanists)
- Henri Cartier-Bresson, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Cartier-Bresson (a Leica with a 50 mm lens, its chrome covered with black tape; flash 'impolite')
- Humanist photography, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanist_photography (small cameras such as the Leica, the Rolleiflex used at waist level, the Ermanox and the Contax; available light)
- Colin L. Westerbeck Jr., 'Night Light: Brassaï and Weegee', Artforum, December 1976: https://www.artforum.com/features/night-light-brassai-and-weegee-214114/ ('The Bergheil Voigtlander camera he used in the '30s, a 6 x 9 cm plate camera, had to be mounted on a tripod and, under the available light in the cafes, would usually have required exposures of three or four seconds or more, sometimes much more'; otherwise a magnesium-powder flash fired by an assistant)
- Rolliflex camera, Science Museum Group Collection (Kodak Collection): https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co8206661 (twin-lens reflex for 120 roll film 2¼ × 2¼ in.; taking lens Zeiss Tessar 7.5 cm f/3.5–22; shutter 1 to 1/300 s, B and T)
- Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Phillips: https://www.phillips.com/detail/henri-cartier-bresson/105336 ('In 1932, a young Henri Cartier-Bresson crouched behind the fence at Paris's Saint-Lazare train station taking with his Leica camera')
- Rudolph Chelminski, 'Paris, Mon Amour', Smithsonian Magazine, July 2005: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/paris-mon-amour-73220943/ (on the 1950 Life assignment that produced Le Baiser de l'hôtel de ville: 'Armed with his trusty Rolleiflex, Doisneau ...')
- Kodak Tri-X, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_Tri-X (introduced around 1940 in sheets rated ASA 200 daylight; released in 35 mm and 120 in 1954; usually rated ISO 400; pushing to EI 800 gives very good results, EI 1600 needs more sophisticated processing, stand development reaches EI 3200)