2“The Hongkongers” – Nicolas Petit’s Candid Street Photography Project
For two years, Brussels-born documentary maker Nicolas Petit has been documenting Hong Kong through candid street photographs, capturing the daily life of some of its 7.3 million people.
An NGO worker by profession, his passion for street photography started in 2014, when he travelled 9,300 kilometres overland from Brussels to Hong Kong.
Street photography likes to dress our wicked impulses in dignified clothes: it gawks, jeers, heckles, and points. It rips out whole fistfuls of urban life, only to lay them before us as the righteous truth. Basking in a city’s unrehearsed harmonies and telling clashes, it can reveal something big and necessary about lives that must be lived in public: the lives of people too hurried or oblivious to look into the lens. Walker Evans rode the subway with a camera lodged in his coat, greedily capturing all the anonymous, unaware faces, pleased by their “naked repose.”
The documentary is an exciting montage of Wallace in his prime, coupling the photographer’s own narrative voice with sequences of him chasing and startling those who Wallace calls “the 1%” with the light of his flashguns. “Harrodsburg caused a storm in Qatar and Saudi Arabia. You can say that I wasn’t too popular there. They objected to me photographing in public… I ended up with my own Arabic hashtag.” says Wallace. The project is more than just a collection of candid snaps of wealthy tourists on a shopping spree to London; it’s a salient look at wealth inequality in a city in which the number of food banks is on the rise.
Produced and directed by FullBleed founders Jude Edginton and Richard Butchins, the film uses a combination of clever head-mounted cameras and handheld viewpoints to weave the viewer through London’s busy crowds and guide them into seeing the world from Wallace’s eyes.
Edginton recounts the first time he met Wallace: “I was hoping to talk him into a film and go up to Blackpool to revisit his Stags and Hens project. This is a brilliant set of pictures where he relentlessly covered the party culture of the city. He pulled his phone out and said ‘look at these, I’m right in the middle of this book project in Knightsbridge’. They were immediately iconic, you could see even in a few early shots that this was going to be a very exciting and important set of photographs.”
5Defining Images from Decisive Moments: Henri Cartier-Bresson at The Rubin
Here is India through the eyes of one of the most — maybe the most — influential and revered photographers of the 20th century: Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004). The artist himself selected 69 of his favorite images for a 2002 show in Oslo, and now that collection is part of the Rubin Museum of Art’s enthralling exhibition, “Henri Cartier-Bresson: India in Full Frame.” As his personal choices, these pictures offer unusual insight into what the artist considered to be among his best and most significant work during his time in India. They include his first meeting with Mahatma Gandhi as well as superb examples of his “street photography,” a genre he is widely credited with pioneering.
Numerous images illustrate what Cartier-Bresson famously termed “The Decisive Moment,” explaining, “Photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event, as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.” What’s more, his first Leica camera, letters, and examples of his published work in Life and other magazines add another dimension to the show and help deepen the understanding of this iconic artist.
6Obituary – Arlene Gottfried, celebrated chronicler of NYC
Celebrated for her warm portraits of fast-vanishing New York communities, Gottfried was 66 when she passed away on 08 August
“Arlene had a unique vision of the world around her,” says gallerist Daniel Cooney. “She was kind and compassionate and she had a wonderful sense of humor, and all of it came through in her work. That’s what made her images so beautiful and unique.”
Born in the Coney Island district of New York and growing up in the Crown Heights district of Brooklyn, Arlene Gottfried studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and initially found work with an advertising agency before going freelance for publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Life, and Newsweek. But her true passion was for portraits shot on the fly, and often on the street, and it was for this work that she became celebrated, going on to publish five books – The Eternal Light (Dewi Lewis, 1991), Midnight (powerHouse Books, 2003), Sometimes Overwhelming (powerHouse Books, 2008), Bacalaitos and Fireworks (powerHouse Books, 2011), and Mommie(powerHouse Books, 2016).
7Mumbai: Street Photographers show us Why Life in the City is beautiful
It’s always interesting to see what the world looks like from one’s personal lens.
For communication professionals Rahul da Cunha and Prashant Godbole, who are also avid photographers, pictures should capture the moments lost between what happens in the real and reel.
The exhibition has images that were shot in places as varied as Mumbai, Varanasi, Allahabad, Ahmedabad, Venice, Istanbul, Cairo, among others. “We carry our cameras everywhere we travel. Some of these photos are in color, but most of them are black and white images,” says da Cunha.
