Read This If You Want to Take Great Photographs

Hard light

Hard light is brutal

For other examples:

Martin Parr p. 18

Daido Moriyama p. 79

Philip-Lorca diCorcia p. 91

Lee Friedlander is a photographer addicted to the brutality of hard light. His compositions of city streets, roadside encounters, American landscapes and himself are often a disorientating onslaught of space and lines, carved up by the omnipotence of light and shadow.

This is one of Friedlander’s most confrontational selfportraits. His finger presses down on that cable-release as though it were the trigger of a bomb. And look at the light. By facing into the light directly, Friedlander causes the shadow of the camera equipment to cut right through him, while the highlight draws us into his steely left eye. This, it’s fair to ...