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Anonymous
Sorry for the mild necromancy, everybody, I've been away from my computer since I posted that. This boards gotten fast, too, from page one to five in less than a day.
>>208153 IMO, the best portraitist is Henri Cartier-Bresson, who it never hurts anybody to look at.
Your styles, both compositionally and otherwise, are so radically different, though, I think you could learn more from:
The aforementioned David Alan Harvey. While he works mostly with a wide (primarily 35mm on 135 film, now 28mm on a Leica M8's 1.33 crop) and you mostly with a medium tele, I can see some sort of relation between your visual idiom.
He's more street and general documentary than portraiture (though now he's just in the past month started a portrait-only book project on American families), but he's a knockout all around. He also runs a great blog (http://davidalanharvey.typepad.com/road_trip/) that discusses the more mental side of photography. There's a link there to his website, with lots of his work, though for some reason conspiciously missing his masterpiece, "Cuba," which can be found here.
http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue9910/cubaintro.htm
Robert Frank. There's also, in your strongest work, a similarity I feel between your compositional style and Frank's, although otherwise your work is dissimilar.
A good look at Ferdinando Scianna, Eli Reed, and Steve McCurry would help you, too.
Everybody I mentioned except Frank happens to be a member of Magnum, so you can go dig through their archives.
Among painters... Modigliani, Rembrandt of course, Paul Gauguin... in a recent semi-interview Harvey had on his blog of William Albert Allard, Allard suggested Matisse, Picasso, and especially Edward Hopper as good painters to study for learning composition generally.
Just study all that, other photographers, painters... that's how one learns composition.
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