As I moved from one example of Sabine Weiss's black and white images to another, I was able to point out with great confidence which ones had been staged and which were spontaneous.
The man in the art gallery, for sure. Good photograph, but clearly choreographed to get the man poised in quite that way, and in positioning the child's buggy. The boys on their bogie, taken in Paris in 1950, the same year that Robert Doisneau produced his carefully staged Le Baiser de l'hôtel de ville (The Kiss at City Hall)? Not so sure, so let us give Mme Weiss the benefit of the doubt.
Then Mme Weiss and I met at the official launch of the exhibition in the Espace Culturel in Le Lavandou. And not one of the pictures, she assured me, had been arranged in any way.
"All of my work is spontaneous," she said. "Though there have been times when I've waited for the right moment."
Waiting, it seems to me, is an entirely normal part of the photographer's metier. But Mme Weiss did qualify her response to explain that when she said "all" her work captured the moment, this excluded some of the professional commissions, for publicity photographs for instance, she had accepted. "I once had to have a little girl with her bowl of soup for four hours to get the right picture."
Now 85, she has made a lifetime habit of getting the right picture.
Sabine Weiss does not have quite the same resonance as Doisneau, Willy Ronis or Henri Carter-Bresson. But as Raphaël Dupouy, a photographer and writer based in Le Lavandou, put it in the newsletter of the Réseau Lalan, we tend to know her images better than we know her name. Look up her name and you may see what he means.
The exhibition (with due apologies to Stéphanie Tétu, whose excellent colour prints are a full part of it) reinforced my growing attachment to back and white, as an observer rather than in terms of any of the modest photographs I take.
It is not always the case. I remember seeing a Daily Telegraph colleague's double-page coverage of famine in Niger. I had a European edition with black and white photos, and the London edition in colour and there is no doubt that the latter, on that occasion, had greater impact.
But in most settings, black and white has its own power, as well as the superb definition underlined by work such as Sabine Weiss's - and also, closer to home metaphorically, by some of the results of Bill Taylor's recent visit to France (not part of the exhibition, but to be found here). The example below was taken, appropriately, in Le Lavandou.
Exhibition continues until May 2. Espace Culturel, avenue de Provence, Le Lavandou (between St Tropez and Toulon). Information: 0033 (0) 6 09 58 45 02. My reproduction of Sabine Weiss's photograph, taken with her consent, is imperfect because it is my photograph of a exhibition leaflet
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