Bruce Gilden on street photography

Source: What Makes a Good Street Photograph? - Take it or Leave it with Bruce Gilden, VICE, 9:44, uploaded 2014-10-03, playlist index 85.

Bruce Gilden introduces himself as a Brooklyn photographer who started taking photographs in 1968, had been a member of Magnum Photos for a decade, and had received a Guggenheim Fellowship the previous year. He makes close-up portraits of people on the street with flash, where beauty can appear in strange faces and ordinary encounters. VICE gives him photographs submitted by other street photographers and asks for a verdict.

An accident needs a deliberate picture around it

Gilden dismisses the first photograph before he has much to say about it. The image is out of focus, although he likes the man’s hat and expression. It has the atmosphere of a film such as The French Connection, which gives it a kind of borrowed credibility. The photograph itself feels accidental.

He makes room for accidents when they belong to a picture that already has a conscious structure. An unexpected blur or gesture can save an image when the photographer has built a frame that can absorb it. Here he cannot tell whether the photographer intended the look or simply missed focus, so the accident carries the whole image. Gilden’s uncertainty about the photographer’s intention becomes part of the criticism.

A toy gun and the history behind it

The next photograph shows a gun at one side of the frame with empty space beside it. Gilden calls the composition weak because the image leaves a dead area around the subject. He then recalls a line attributed to the philosopher George Santayana: a person who forgets history is condemned to repeat it.

He recognises the picture as a loose attempt to repeat William Klein’s famous photograph of a Brooklyn child holding a toy gun to his head, making a cross-eyed face. Knowing Klein’s image would give the photographer a stronger sense of how to form the frame. It would also reveal the burden of borrowing a recognisable image from twentieth-century documentary photography. Gilden adds that the Klein photograph is not among his favourites, which makes the comparison a judgement about composition rather than an appeal to Klein’s authority.

The story inside a photograph

Gilden likes photographs that let the viewer invent a story. In the third image, an older man looks at a younger woman while another person lies unconscious or asleep in the background. The woman holds an apple. Gilden imagines that she is a sorceress who has drugged the man, after tiring of older men approaching her, and that the person on the ground is an earlier victim. He says plainly that he does not know what is in the apple. The story belongs to the viewer’s response to the arrangement, not to evidence that the scene records an actual crime.

The photograph works through its small details. The older man’s desire draws the eye first. The person lying behind the couple then redirects it and turns a simple encounter into a more unsettled scene. Without that figure, Gilden says, the background would become sand and the photograph would lose the movement that returns the eye to its main action. A detail can therefore matter even when most viewers would prefer that it were absent. The image becomes stronger because the unwanted person completes its route through the frame.

Organic flow and the large print

Gilden treats movement through the frame as a test that applies to any subject. One street photograph sends the eye from one element to another in a sequence that feels assembled rather than lived. He knows how difficult this kind of work is because he has spent most of his life doing it, and he still finds the arrangement unnatural. The photographer has talent, yet the picture does not make him want to keep looking and ask what is happening.

Another image handles the movement better. People in the background fill the frame, although one of them distracts from the path through the picture. Gilden describes the desired movement as a connected route through the elements. Complexity can stay complex while the viewer still feels that the image has grown organically.

The photograph he likes best has a larger scale. A central person’s face seems carved from stone, almost like a figure on Mount Rushmore. The eye then moves to another face with closed eyes in the sun. Gilden’s only change would place a woman elsewhere because her face becomes a small interruption in that route. The photographer could not control that position, so the criticism stays proportionate. He calls the picture very good and says he would like to see it printed very large.

A joke that stops at the first reading

The last substantial photograph makes Gilden smile. A woman appears to light a cigarette from a flame that could catch her hair or burn her face. He reads the image as a one-line joke that most people could understand without much photographic knowledge. The woman seems drunk or high, yet her body moves with a clean rhythm into the flame, and the flame itself rises through the picture with a beautiful shape.

The details carry a second reading. The Lions Club setting and the American flag turn the scene into a possible satire about America, with one reading close to “America the Beautiful” and another asking whether Americans are simply ignorant. Gilden sees enough value for the image to work as part of a sarcastic book about America. He still rates it weakly as a photograph because the joke is too obvious. It catches the eye and supplies a laugh, then leaves little behind.

He ends on a photograph centred on the underside of a woman’s chin. The subject gives him no reason to stay with the image, and the critique closes with a quick comic exchange about whether the VICE crew has received anything useful from him.

Limits of the verdict

Gilden offers a working photographer’s taste rather than a method that could settle the quality of these images for everyone. His repeated terms are concrete enough to use: intention gives an accident somewhere to belong, history changes what an imitation asks of the viewer, details direct attention, and a complicated frame still needs a felt route through it. The final distinction between a striking joke and a strong photograph remains his own judgement.

The captions identify several photographs only through Gilden’s spoken descriptions, and the note does not inspect the submitted images independently. His reference to Santayana is a paraphrase, while the transcript does not name the exact Klein book or give a source for the historical claim. The biographical details at the opening come from Gilden’s introduction and VICE’s description rather than from an independent account.

Further reading / references

• George Santayana, the philosopher whose line about forgetting history Gilden paraphrases.
• William Klein’s New York photobook, which Gilden invokes through the photograph of a Brooklyn child with a toy gun.