people watching and street photography II.

First sold in 1925, the Leica was the first commercially successful camera to use 35 mm film. Its compactness and bright viewfinder matched to lenses of quality helped photographers move through busy streets and capture fleeting moments.

Henri Cartier-Bresson acquired the Leica camera with 50 mm lens in Marseilles that would accompany him for many years. The anonymity that the small camera gave him in a crowd or during an intimate moment was essential in overcoming unnatural behavior of those who were aware of being photographed. (He enhanced his anonymity by painting all shiny parts of the Leica with black paint.) The Leica opened up the ability to capture the world in its actual state of movement and transformation.

Henri Cartier-Bresson:

I went to Marseille. A small allowance enabled me to get along, and I worked with enjoyment. I had just discovered the Leica. It became the extension of my eye, and I have never been separated from it since I found it. I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to "trap" life--to preserve life in the act of living. Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.

 

Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project: "the flâneur" is an invention of the French poet Charles Baudelaire who is depicted as a passionate wanderer. The flâneur was a figure of the modern artist-poet, a figure keenly aware of the bustle of modern life, an amateur detective and investigator of the city, but also a sign of the alienation of the city and of capitalism.

"The arcades dot the metropolitan landscape like caves containing the fossil remains of a vanished monster: the consumer of the pre-imperial era of capitalism, the last dinosaur of Europe."