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This is half a review and half a reason to talk about some of the things that the book raises. But first, the book, which is simply called Gianni Berengo Gardin: Photographer. ISBN 978 0500543122. Thames & Hudson 2005.

This is a 440 page retrospective type book for the photographer sometimes called the Italian Cartier-Bresson. One can hardly do anything but recommend the book which combines high quality reproduction of high quality photographs and no academic essays. There are a number of across the spine shots – and is usual, these are the more famous ones – but not so many that it is a feature of the book. Regrettable certainly, but not disastrous.

I would say that Berengo Gardin’s pictures don’t quite have the lightness of touch of Cartier-Bresson’s, but they are clearly in the same vein (although he says that Willy Ronis was more of an influence). Certainly you could extract a subset of them and call them HCB’s unpublished Milan photos and only those who knew would know. Possibly any heaviness that I’m seeing is a tendency to some more overt political subject matter. Mild, but there. The other notable difference from Cartier-Bresson’s work is that Berengo Gardin didn’t stop photographing. It is really interesting to see 1990’s subject matter photographed in the 1950’s aesthetic.

At the time of publication GBG had nearly 200 books to his name, yet, as of today, there is no Wikipedia entry, and nobody, to my knowledge, trips GBG off their tongue in the HCB sort of way (note: there is an entry in the Italian language version of Wikipedia, but that in itself says a lot). I can see nothing in his career, nor his photographs, to explain why GBG isn’t better known. It isn’t as if he was hidden away behind the iron curtain, or hampered by a rarely translated language. Yet there are nearly 500,000 English language page hits on Google for “Henri Cartier-Bresson” and only 12,000 for “Gianni Berengo Gardin”. The tipping point between well known and famous is hard to predict. Nearly two hundred books I remind you.

In place of the usual dense essays, the book is topped and tailed with interview transcripts. Even calling them interviews is a bit too formal, as the one at the front of the book, at least, is more of a recorded conversation. This gives access to the photographer in a direct way – even to the point where the not quite fluent translations put over some feel of the original. Two extracts caught my eye. The first is about editing, and this is a theme that I’m noticing more and more. It isn’t that photographers can’t edit, but that they can’t edit their own work unless they can divorce their pictures from the memories of taking them:

My most famous photo is the one of the vaporetto in Venice, with all those reflections…. Actually, for a number of years I didn’t even think it was a good photo. The problem with photographers is that you tend to measure the importance of a photograph by the effort needed to take it. If it requires a great effort, like climbing a cold and wind-swept mountain, you think that you have created a masterpiece, when really it ought to be scrapped. When Bischof returned from his travels, he didn’t choose his photographs personally but asked his wife Rosellina, who had stayed behind at home, to do it for him, saying, ‘She sees the image and judges that alone. She does not consider all the factors that lie behind the image, all the sensations I felt. There may be a place, a house, with a beautiful melody that still haunts me, but she can’t hear that piece of music, and therefore she isn’t influenced by it.’

The second extract was in response to: “You also create things that have great value aesthetically, not only socially”.

Yes, undeniably. But, for example, I don’t agree with the criticisms of Salgado’s excessive formalism. Ugo Mulas used to say, ‘There is an enormous difference between beautiful photography and good photography. Beautiful photography has no content but is perfect in form, whilst good photography has content. So we favour good photography above all. But if good photography also has form, it is easier to understand, and it helps and encourages us to interpret it.’

Read that, if possible, without the value loading of the word ‘good’. Substitute, perhaps, another word. It is a powerful exposition of the difference between form and content. I sometimes think that we are surrounded by photos that have either form or content, but we rarely see photos that have both. It is very difficult to talk about this without it becoming a semantic, or even a tautological, discussion. This is good because it has form and content. I think it has form and content because I think it is good…..

The question of whether a photograph has content or not is, by itself, not a simple one. Sometimes the content comes with the context in which the photo is seen. That context may be a title, other surrounding photos, a text, or even the physical place. Because of this I can’t even fall back on the ‘I know it when I see it’ style of argument, because I know that whether I see it or not depends on more than just whether it is there.

However, difficulties aside, the form and content question is one worth pursuing. But not now. This post is long enough.

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• Deep or wide. And travel
• Les choix d’Henri Cartier-Bresson
• The Online Photographer has moved