Carl Mydans

"Unlike, say, Smith, who planned his pictures in sequences and fought over how they would be laid out on the page, Mr. Mydans specialized in getting one picture that told the story by itself. As a result, he proved most useful to Life's editors when space was tight and news was breaking." - NYT Carl Mydans' Obituary

Mydans photographs capture a lot in one photo, I think this is very true. Though, I felt that perhaps there were certain reasons for that, one being that he did not exactly go to the country with an agenda of taking a collection of photographs. Rather, he was captured and took photographs of his stay there. In that way perhaps, there was less thought and more about getting the moment. In a way, I felt that he had incredible moments in his photographs, like the one with the French woman who was accused of sleeping with Germans and thus had to have her head shaved while other people looked and laughed. That picture was incredibly powerful.

Mydans doesn't try anything tricky, only captures raw human emotion and I definitely got that from his photographs. I think this is an incredible quality to have as a war photographer -- it's not necessarily about the angle or the lighting, but simply about the human's emotions.

"Mydans has said that he has always been a people-watcher, looking at posture and the telling gesture which might reveal something of the person. He would watch mouths and look for falseness. As he began to understand this unspoken language and interpret what he was so carefully observing he wrote, 'I had found a source of stories as wide and as varied and as captivating as the human race.'" -- Marianne Fulton