Chris Marker - Passagers

I have read a number of photography articles in recent months on the annual photography festival in France "Les Rencontres d'Arles 2011". One of these that particularly drew my attention was about a french photographer called Chris Marker and a series of his recent photographs entitled "Passagers" (passengers).

The series comprises photographs of people taken in the Paris subway. In four of these, he noted a similarity between the features and pose of four women passengers with four masterpieces of painting for example the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci and Mademoiselle Riviere by Ingres. I liked the juxtaposition of the painted portraits within the frame of the photographs. This draws the viewer into seeing these women, who are like those we see every day, as extraordinary. It emphasizes their distinctiveness, their features and their beauty.

From a practical viewpoint, the subjects appear to have been unaware that they were being photographed. It is, of course, possible that these poses were arranged deliberately by the photographer, but I see nothing in the photograph to suggest that this is the case.

He (I assume the photographer is male - see below) would seem to have been sitting or standing close to the subjects using a standard range lens. The lighting, which I assume is the artificial lighting in the carriages, would seem to be overhead and does not cast hard shadows.

The biography provided for Chris Marker states that he is now 90 years old, he started out as a writer, journalist and editor. Later he became a film critic, film maker and photographer. Chris Marker however is apparently a pseudonym, and his real name is not disclosed. This hidden identity seems very surprising for someone whose work is so prominent.

Observations

These photographs led me to the thought that the role of much of photography (whether photojournalism, nature, street photography, portraiture, landscape) is to see the world and its life, acting on behalf of the majority of people who are too preoccupied or too busy to look around for themselves. I recognize that some photographers stage manage the image contents to fulfill their objective, and therefore do not operate in this way.

The majority of photographers however are specialists in seeing, looking closely at life and recording the aspects that they find interesting, amusing, shocking, curious etc. hoping that others will want to look at them as well.

This would seem to be a way to distinguish the "photograph" (an image of some aspect of life or the world which possibly will be of interest to others) from "snapshots" (an image of a person or place which has been taken in the same way hundreds of times previously).

This also be a way to distinguish photography from much of painting and sculpture, which aims to create or represent something for particular purposes. Stage managed photography has definite similarity with this creative art.

On this basis, I would categorize many of the famous photographers as great "seers", as they recognized and recorded distinctive features of the world around them, rather than creative artists.