Henri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson has a very impressive skill of composing his photos despite the fact that they are mainly unplanned and rarely cropped. A lot of his photos have a clear distinction between background and foreground, often with the lighting between the two contrasting heavily.A lot of geometric shapes can be seen throughout his work, he uses the fibonacci spiral as well as more a more rigid use of negative space that can sometimes make his photos seem like they are made up of different components, almost like a collage. Something that shows his composition to be effective is the fact I always feel drawn to look at something and explore the image.
I like this image a lot, especially because of its striking composition. Despite the fact that it is mainly made up of geometric shapes it is easy for viewers to speculate on it and come to their own conclusions about the subject. I think something that makes this image so intriguing to me is the contrast between the foreground and the background, both the colour and the focus of are very different in the two sections making it look almost like seperate images placed next to each other. The man on the right looks like some sort of guard, the way he is looking out through the framing of the door makes me think he could be looking for something or someone, on the left side of the photo we see what looks like a boy sneaking through a door. When I saw the photo I came to the conclusion that the guard is looking for the boy and the boy is sneaking to get away from him. The simplistic look of the photo doesn't take away from my speculation about the relationship between the two subjects, in fact it makes me more impressed that the photographer could capture something like this with such a lack of detail. Henri Cartier-Bresson uses a lot of leading line in his photos but it doesnt seem like this photo makes use of this, with more of a grid-like composition . Maybe the handholding nature of that type of composition would be going too far, the story is still being told without it. The use of mainly squares and rectangles I feel also gives the photo a feel of authority, looking almost like a cell. I would be very happy to capture something like this but I think there's some amount of luck needed to be able to find something like this to create an image of. The photographer has had a lifelong career's worth of opportunity to come across interesting scenes like these so I don't know how easy it would be to take photos like this in an unplanned environment without a lot of trial and error.