The French Photogs and Children

I think it was Henri Cartier-Bresson who said, and I’m paraphrasing, “Be careful of taking pictures of children because they’re cute and you can get distracted in cuteness and not make a good picture.” I couldn’t find the quote on Google so I might be remembering it wrong. That said, I get the point. Cartier-Bresson and Doisneau have some wonderful photos of children in Paris. When I go out to take pictures of the kiddos at CII’s Head Start sites it’s so easy to focus on the kids' cuteness. I find that I have to give myself an assignment for the photo session to tell a story.

This past week I went to the Compton Head Start. I tried to look for relationships. I also tried to find lines. I wanted the plane of the sensor to be parallel to the plane of the background. That said, I still struggled to find a purpose. I felt like I was just chasing around the kids and snapping dozens of photos. I felt lost. But when I came back to the office I remembered an article I recently read about a woman who was using her edit process to copy what a Fuji x100v. So I thought, what if I picked a color look and did it to all the photos. I went for a hyper saturated social media look. It’s not a technical term and I can’t 100% explain it but it was a look. Below is what I got. Today I’m going to our Stanford Head Start and I’m going to focus on “connection between children and teacher.” I don’t know what that means…yet.