Ernst Haas

Ernst Haas is an excellent and well-known photographer. Famous for his many pictures of celebrities and other famous people, he also did a great deal of Black and White photography. Ernst was a genius in that he could find a brilliant photograph in anything, even a dirty sock. There is a particular portrait in the B & W gallery that intrigues my interest. It is titled "Torn Poster NYC 1966" and can be viewed at http://www.ernst-haas.com/introduction3.html along with his many other wonderful pieces of art.

"Torn Poster" depicts a boy whose face you can only see from the nose down and his eyes are closed. Below him is essentially a torn poster. It also appears that there is a smaller figure of a person walking along the top of this poster. The wonder of this particular photograph is that I'm not quite sure it would work well if he had used color. The black and while aspects allow the imagination to work and to discover that of the torn poster.

"PeelingPaint-Profile, California, 1963" is one of Ernst's color photographs that I enjoy. His usage of color in the particular picture takes hold of the different angles of the paper and accents them so that the eye sees not merely peeling paint, but the face of a beautiful woman on the wall. While it might be interesting to see this picture in black and white, I don't think that the different layers and the idea of the face would be as prevelant.