Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century - Part 2

Culture

The poetic photos of Henri Cartier-Bresson capture the flux of life and the cultural changes of the second half of the 20th century

Author:

By Mark R. Gould

Henri Cartier Bresson photograph of bullfight -San Fermines, Pamplona, Spain. 1952

See part 1 of Mark R.Gould's interview with David Travis to learn about the traveling exhibition of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work and the early years of his career.

An exhibit of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s moving and poetic photographs can be enjoyed at the Art Institute of Chicago through Oct. 3. It then travels to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Henri Cartier-Bresson—the Modern Century is the first full retrospective of his work in three decades. Organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the exhibition shows the “rich interplay between Cartier-Bresson the artist, gifted at capturing the flux of life, and Cartier-Bresson the photojournalist whose lens shaped our understanding of seismic political and cultural changes across the second half of the 20th century.”

This exhibition offers 300 images.” It includes both his formally groundbreaking early images and his historically significant postwar work—in India and Indonesia during struggles for independence, in China during the revolution, in the Soviet Union following Stalin’s death—that redefined the field of photojournalism. Other sections present the themes that preoccupied Cartier-Bresson throughout his career: portraiture, the persistence of ancient customs and patterns of life, the transformation of these patterns by modern industry and commerce, the poetry of human encounters on the street, and the psychology of the crowd,” according to the exhibit.

Recently, David Travis, former chair of the department of photography, Art Institute of Chicago, offered his thoughts about his friend and colleague for the @ your library web site. Travis has organized and presented more than 150 exhibitions of photography at the Art Institute during his 36-year tenure, including exhibitions of the work of Walker Evans, André Kertész, Edward Weston, Paul Strand, and Brassaï. He is perhaps best known for his landmark exhibitions On the Art of Fixing a Shadow, an exhibition of more than 400 photographs, and Starting with Atget: Photographs from the Julien Levy Collection.

Travis has also guest curated exhibitions for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the

Whitney Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. For

his special contributions to the advancement of awareness and understanding of French

culture, he was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French

government in 1987. He has also been a guest scholar at the J. Paul Getty Museum and in 2002 he was named a “Chicagoan of the Year” by Chicago magazine. At the Edge of the Light: Thoughts on Photographers and Photography, on Talent and Genius, a collection of his lectures and essays, was published in 2003.

“A photographer to emulate”

DT: While part of a team of curators preparing a large exhibition and catalogue of the work of the Hungarian/American photographer André Kertész, I asked Henri one evening if he remembered the first time he had seen Kertész. He responded instantly, “Yes, yes, in the cafés on the boulevard Montparnasse, when I was in knee pants.” It was his way of saying that for him Kertész was always the master, as it was long after he was out of the French schoolboy uniform. For him Kertész was a photographer to emulate, not only in his skill at recording a scene, but in the concern and tenderness the older master brought to his subjects. Lighter and more portable hand cameras and faster film made a new kind of photograph possible, one that could select its own vantage point free of tripods and manipulating heavy cameras and one with a rapid frame advance mechanism for spooled film, which could better respond to and arrest the relentless fluidity of a scene.

The “search for a vocabulary to describe new images”

DT: Before Henri took up photography in the style we have come to know, writers began in the late 1920s to search for the vocabulary to describe these new images. Pierre MacOrlan used the term “le bon moment” (the right moment) and went on to say that this kind of photograph causes a “death” for a such a tiny fraction of a second that it becomes unnoticeable to those who underwent it. The result was an ambiguous sliver of a narrative that viewers were to complete in their own imaginations. The writer Pierre Bost named the phenomenon a “vérité éphémère” (an ephermeral truth), giving it the tinge of a metaphysical dimension.

“His first great book of photographs”

In 1952, two decades after becoming a “photographer,” Henri published his first great book of photographs and titled it “L’mage a la sauvette.” Sauvette is a particular French word that we only approximate in English. To sell something “a la sauvette” is to hawk something on the street with one eye looking out for the police. Thus, Henri acted like a thief, which is exactly the term Irving Penn used, rather lovingly, when describing to me how Henri had surreptitiously made a portrait of his brother, Arthur Penn, and himself one afternoon in the fashion photographer’s apartment. But it was no secret that Henri was there to make a portrait of the two highly talented brothers; it was an assignment from Vogue, I believe. But true to form, Henri took the portrait secretly before a time of tea and conversation, long before Irving asked how he would like them to pose for him. So in Henri’s mind this particular kind of image was a picture composed and taken on the run, by stealth, candidly, almost always as if the photographer were the hunted rather than the hunter. Of course, the term “decisive moment” makes for a better English title, as it is a ready handle for a more complicated idea. It is the phrase that the publishers,Simon and Schuster, used in their publication. And although the French-language publisher, Verve, used “L’image a la sauvette,” it is the English term that became well known. In both editions, the insightful text Henri wrote as an introduction is prefaced by a quote from the 17th century Cardinal de Retz; “Il n’y rien en ce monde qui n’ait moment decisive,” which I like to translate to mean “There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.” “ But even with the Cardinal’s quote, one does well to remember that this rather overly photographic term overshadows Henri’s core concern to “catch life in the act of living,” yet another phrase that would also make for a complicated title.

MG: Why was the decisive moment so influential?

DT: I think it was simply another photographic element which photographers could use to help form their pictures. The basic elements of making a “photographic” picture were a sense of space or object, a sense of light, and a sense of time. Most viewers are satisfied most easily with photographs in that order of importance. Once Henri reversed that order by using timing to bring the element of time into view, photographs became exciting again.

MG: The Leica 35mm camera was his preferred camera. Why?

DT: Originally, what eventually became the Leica camera was a small oblong boxy devise for testing the correct exposure for 35mm motion picture film. Oscar Barnard, the inventor of the camera was also an avid mountain climber and made a true camera out of the original idea: well built, compact, and light. The first Leicas were introduced to the market in 1925 and were instantly successful.

Henri bought his first Leica in 1932 while he was living in Marseilles recovering from black water fever contracted during his travels in Africa. He found it to be the perfect companion for his visual adventures observing public street life. It was so quick and simple to operate, it became, as he liked to say, “an extension of his eye.” Other hand cameras of the time were often a little more cumbersome to operate and some had to be loaded with small glass plates for each exposure. With the Lecia, Henri had 36 exposures for each roll of film. Photographers who saw Henri in action said he held the Leica in his left hand secured loosely to his wrist with the neck strap. He developed a maneuver to twist the knurled film advance knob to follow the scene that was unfolding before him. Because the camera was small and easily stored in a pocket or with a coat sleeve, Henri could remain “invisible” to those who were the subjects of his picture making.

Because the Leica was an extension of his eye, it really did become his sketchbook, a machine for capturing fleeting moments or the changing relationship of one thing to another within the frame. We would do well to remember that although time was such an important element in the photographs that Henri made, his early photographs were pre-visioned as geometric visual structures before any action was recorded. His way of making photographs required reflexes attuned to the fluidity of the scene as the changing structure of what we would call composition, or perhaps more accurately expressed by in French by the theatrical and cinematic term “mise en scene.”

MG: Why did he work exclusively in black and white?

DT: Henri grew up in an age of black and white. He considered black and white renditions of a scene to be an abstraction to be added to the abstractions of the geometric structure he perceived. Although complicated, he had the vision and instinct to control these elements. And I should add that color film could be about ten times less sensitive to light than black and white film, which gave it a distinct disadvantage to any photographer like Henri who only worked with available light.

Resources

Books

Henri Cartier-Bresson: A Biography. London
Pierre Assouline (2005). Thames & Hudson.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: the Modern Century
Peter Galassi (2010). London: Thames & Hudson.

Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography
Lynne Warren (2006). New York: Routledge.

An Inner Silence : The Portraits of Henri Cartier-Bresson
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson (2006) London : Thames & Hudson.

Articles

"Tête à Tête: Portraits by Henri Cartier-Bresson"
Washington Post Magazine
Special feature on Tête à Tête exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

"Special Report: Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004)"
The Guardian.
Links to stories about Cartier-Bresson from The Guardian's archive.

"Cartier-Bresson's Impact on Photojournalism"
By Claude Cookman
National Press Photographers Association

"John Berger pays tribute to his good friend"
By John Berger
The Observer, August 2004

Online Exhibitions

Tête à Tête: Portraits by Henri Cartier-Bresson
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Henri Cartier-Bresson Portfolio
Magnum Photos

Henri Cartier-Bresson Portfolio
Photography Now

Also of Interest

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Video interview with Charlie Rose

Resources about Henri Cartier-Bresson on ArtCyclopedia

Henri Cartier-Bresson's biographic sketch at Find A Grave

Photo credit:
Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
San Fermines, Pamplona, Spain. 1952
Gelatin silver print, 11 7/8 x 8 1/4" (30.1 x 21 cm)
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris
©2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris