cartier-bresson: seeking inner silence

                          

Henri Cartier-Bresson, New York City 1946.  The Museum of Modern Art. Magnum Photos, courtesy Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson

World War II is coming to an end. A mother and a son reuniting? As they embrace in the crowded port of New York, their faces are barely visible. But we can clearly see expressions of others waiting for their beloved ones: tense, hesitant, impatient, cautiously joyful. “New York 1946” states the caption. Cartier-Bresson felt nothing more elaborate was needed.

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He got his first camera feeling he needed „a quicker instrument than a brush.” It was in 1931, during a trip to Ivory Coast, where he went to digest Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and get over unhappy love affair, that he started photographing. Years later he would say that this new piece of hardware felt to him „like a big warm kiss, a shot from a revolver, and like the psychoanalyst’s couch.” Next year he got his first Leica.

„It became the extension of my eye and I have never been separated from it since I found it” he will say later. „I prowled the streets all day, feeling strung up and ready to pounce, determined to ‘trap’ life – to preserve life in the act of living. Above all, I craved to seize, in the confines of one single photograph, the whole essence of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.”

Meanwhile, these were worldly events which were to unroll before his eyes – the wrenching challenges of what W.H. Auden called „ shallow, dishonest decade.” 

Following Nazi invasion of France, Cartier-Bresson was captured and sent into a German labour camp. "For a young bourgeois with Surrealist ideas, breaking stone and working in a cement factory was a very good lesson" he remembered years later in an interview with the New York Times. Following two unsuccessful attempts, he managed to escape in 1943. Only to learn that Museum of Modern Art in New York, not knowing of his whereabouts, started preparing a post-humous exhibition of his photographs from the 1930s. He happily embraced the idea (it opened in 1947) but had no intention of going back to the pre-war era of playful, beguiling images.

“Being a photojournalist didn’t mean being just a photographer” writes Galassi in The Modern Century. “It meant being a student, a diplomat, a traveller, an investigator, a reporter, a historian. To Cartier-Bresson it meant engaging the whole of the world.”

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Georgia, 1972: sombre Russian family enjoys a roadside picnic, their new car visible against silhouette of an old Orthodox monastery and cows grazing next to it; Sumatra, 1950: a turbaned woman walks past an elegant pattern of rice paddies, shaded by palms; New York, 1947 a self-confident man in a double-breasted suit, enjoys a cigar on the steps of a monumental building at Foley Square its columns elegantly converging with the stairs; Mende, France,1968: two farmers engage in a heated argument. Panoply of human experience. Each of those photographs -- elegant, sparse, carefully composed -- contains a universe. 

Divided into 13 sections, (of which only the first one – presenting his early images and titled „Prologue” – is chronological) MoMA exhibit may seem overwhelming. Old Worlds – East and West, are juxtaposed with the New Ones; China’s Leap Forward (Mao’s program of forced industrialization) is followed by inner workings of a New York bank. 

Perhaps most powerful are portraits that Cartier-Bresson kept making throughout his far-flung travels and that include an impressive roaster of 20th century personalities, mostly artists and writers (he avoided actors, believing they are too professional and start posing right away). From Jean-Paul Sartre, Coco Chanel, Madame Lanvin, to Truman Capote, William Faulkner, Louis Kahn, Irene and Frederic Joliot Curie, he would try to photograph them in their natural settings, engaging in a tete a tete dialogue. 


When asked how much time a portrait session would take, he liked to tell his sitters it would be longer than the dentist, but shorter than the psychoanalyst. „Above all I look for an inner silence. I seek to translate the personality and not an expression.”

Arguably the same thing can be said not just about portraits, but almost all images he took. He calmly and elegantly registered what mattered and swept away everything else. 


He once explained that he tries to approach his subjects on tiptoe, with a velvet hand and hawk’s eye and almost every single image presented in MoMA attests that this indeed was his method. He photographed society, culture, civilization – that is history – through distinctive, individual moments; freezing the rapidly changing world in beautiful simplicity and clarity.

He hardly ever edited his images believing a photographer’s job was complete once he released the shutter. Focusing on his decisive moment, interested in just a fraction of a second, he would leave it to others to worry about how his photographs are sequenced or presented, cropped or altered (he and other Magnum photographers have insisted they should not be „mutilated”). As a result, impressive collection of his images he left – so poignant, so carefully composed, balanced and elegant – does not amount to a ready or complete account that can easily be absorbed.

Unresolved, idiosyncratic and perplexing at times, his photographs challenge the viewer.  Cartier Bresson provides his audience with the most beautiful raw material that he collected across the globe. Now they need to search inside, find their own decisive moments. Set out on their own journey. 

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century, April 11-June 28, 2010. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

cartier-bresson: it's through living that we discover ourselves

     

          Henri Cartier-Bresson, Hyeres, France, 1932. The Museum of Modern Art; Magnum Photos, courtesy Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Truman Capote described him as a “frantic dragonfly ... Leica glued to his eye ... doing his clickety clicks with a joyous intensity and religious fervour that filled his whole being.” 


How long has he been waiting to snap the image of a cyclist in Hyeres? 


Speeding past the intricate staircase – twisting and turning, uncoiling down to the street – the biker leans forward, with a clear sense of purpose. 


Beautiful, complete. 


Cartier-Bresson just understood that a photograph can fix eternity in a an instant.

The ability to do so – it came to be eponymouse with the decisive moment – became his trademark. Even though he coined the term himself – it first appeared in the seminal album of his photographs published simultaneously in Paris and New York in 1952 – he was not entirely happy with the label. Perhaps the French version, Images a la sauvette, was closer to what he meant: images on the go, fleeting and ephemeral. The French use the expression “a la sauvette” to refer to vendors who sell on the street, without a licence. There is something rascal, dragonfly-like about the whole process.

In 1932, he found himself behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, in Paris, without a licence but with a Leica glued to his eye. He must have been peeking through the fence, as some repairs around the train station were carried on. A few pieces of metal are scattered on the ground; a man – blurry silhouette –is leaping over a large puddle. His heel will never touch its water reflection. Everything is still except for this vital piece of action.

„Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever,” Cartier-Bresson said in an interview in 1957. By then, this snap-shot had become an icon that no self-respecting history of photography dared to omit. He claimed he was not interested in photography but life. “It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us,” he wrote. Frantic dragonfly, patient and alert, he was an artist without a licence, but with isatiable appetite.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century, April 11-June 28, 2010. Museum of Modern Art, New York.