Rouen, France 1955
There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.
(Henri Cartier-Bresson)
So intrigued by Henri Cartier-Bresson‘s photographs–MoMA’s big retrospective reminded me of how much I like his work. Though some seem “snapshot-like” at first glance, after looking more closely I am struck by his very real intuition about composition–one that so seamlessly combines content and form. “Photography is not like painting,” he told The Washington Post in 1957. “There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative,” he said. “Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.”
Martine's Legs, 1967
In 1931, Cartier-Bresson began to use a camera and to make photographs that reveal the influence of both Cubism and Surrealism—bold, flat planes, collagelike compositions, and spatial ambiguity—as well as an affinity for society’s outcasts and the back alleys where they lived and worked. Within a year, he had mastered the miniature 35mm Leica camera and had begun traveling in Italy, Spain, Morocco, and Mexico, developing what would become one of the hallmarks of twentieth-century photographic style. Although he was influenced by such photographers as Eugène Atget and André Kertész (1894–1985), his photographic fusion of form and content was groundbreaking. In his 1952 landmark monograph The Decisive Moment, he defined his philosophy: “To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which gave that event its proper expression.”
Cartier-Bresson was drafted into the French army in 1940. He was taken prisoner by the Germans but escaped on his third attempt and joined the French Resistance. In 1946, he assisted in the preparation of a “posthumous” show of his work organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the mistaken belief that he had been killed in the war. The following year he founded the Magnum photo agency with Robert Capa (1913–1954), David “Chim” Seymour (1911–1956), and others, and spent the next twenty years on assignment, documenting the great upheavals in India and China, and also traveling to the Soviet Union, Cuba, Canada, Japan, and Mexico.
nvincent
