Rollfilm

Henri Cartier-Bresson, the relatively reclusive master of 20th century photography and the grandfather of photojournalism, personally involves himself for the first time in a film project about himself in HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON: THE IMPASSIONED EYE.The intense vitality and presence of Cartier-Bresson’s recollections bear eloquent testimony to his “impassioned eye.” An incomparable visual journey traces half a century of photographic assimilation of the world, exploring entire continents and introducing us to people, whose often delightfully humorous portraits by Cartier-Bresson, are frequently as famous as the sitters themselves.Actress Isabelle Huppert, playwright Arthur Miller, publisher Robert Delpire and the photographers Elliott Erwitt, Josef Koudelka and Ferdinando Scianna present their own very personal views on Cartier-Bresson as friend and photographer.

source: Palm-Pictures

“The Impassioned Eye” 1-10

The wikimedia caption of the photograph “Boulevard du Temple” by Louis Daguerre states:

This is “Boulevard du Temple”, the first ever photograph of a person. The photo was taken by Louis Daguerre in late 1838 or early 1839 in Paris. It is of a busy street, but because exposure time was over ten minutes, the city traffic was moving too much to appear. The exception is a man in the bottom left corner, who stood still getting his boots polished long enough to show.

High Resolution Image on wikimedia.org

Via Blake Andrews blog i found this video, which shows an event that took place at New York’s Grand Central Station and could be read as a hommage to “Boulevard du Temple”. Downshift in a constanty rushing environment.

Sitenote regarding Daguerre’s “Boulevard du Temple”

In his blog-post “traces” Nicholas Jenkins (literary historian at Stanford University) deals with the question of absence and presence of people in the daguerreotype “Boulevard du Temple”.