Influences

Child with a hand grenade by Dianne Arbus.

Having so far looked at some very intriguing photographers on the course, I would like to appropriate and apply their style to some of my own work, as well as influences of realism from certain filmmakers and cinematographers.
For me the two most interesting photographers I have encountered so far have been Dianne Arbus and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Though both unique I believe them to both posses an unflinching quality in their work to capture the real and the alternative in equal measure.
Another primary influence for me (coming from a film studies background) is the work of directors in the Italian neo-realist movement, the British new wave and the French Nouvelle Vague. Most of the works from these periods in cinema have an air of documentary realism that adds an urgency and candid energy to them.


Still from Roma, città aperta(1945) shot using fast stock and natural lighting, to give more of a sense of newsreel footage than the turgid gloss of a Hollywood picture.


Behind the Gare St. Lazare by Cartier-Bresson, who saw the camrea as a new way of painting captureing things exactly as they were: "I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant."