Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition in NYC: A review
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Henri Cartier-Bresson: Hommage, an exhibition at the International Center of
Photography, New York City, May 13-September 4, 1994
TESTIFYING TO THE SCARS OF THE WORLD
By David Walsh
The homage to French photographer Henri-Cartier Bresson at the International
Center of Photography is poorly organized. Many of the texts which surround
the photos say very little, and say it pretentiously. Furthermore, there is
virtually no reference, except of the most oblique sort, to the momentous
political events and struggles which played such a part in forming Cartier-
Bresson's outlook and approach to photography.
Nonetheless, many of the photos speak directly to the spectator. Cartier-
Bresson is an important figure in twentieth century photography and deserves
consideration.
In his 1928 novel, Nadja, André Breton wrote that "human emancipation ...
remains the only cause worth serving." This belief had led him to join the
Communist Party in 1926, and later to enter into opposition against Stalinism
and participate in the effort to build the Fourth International.
Bresson, born in 1908 into a wealthy family, drew inspiration from Breton's
view of the struggle for human emancipation.
He had wanted to be a painter, but, as it turned out, he wasn't good enough.
Or perhaps, in reaction to his bourgeois background, he needed something more
direct and blunt than painting. Moreover, he came of age in the late 1920s:
great and ominous events loomed on the horizon. He really wanted a weapon to
turn against a hated social order and culture, and he found a Leica.
Lightweight, handheld cameras were a relatively new phenomenon. Photography in
the nineteenth century involved manipulating a cumbersome camera and a tripod.
"The photographer could make only one picture at a time, usually with delays
of several minutes between exposures, and the length of the exposures
themselves made it impossible to arrest motion" (Peter Galassi, Henri Cartier-
Bresson, the early work, 1979). In other words, one static creature captured
another. The new small camera allowed both object and subject to move. It
permitted the photographer to capture a process as it unfolded, moment by
moment.
Cartier-Bresson wasn't the first to make use of such a camera for serious
picture-taking. Hungarian-born André Kertész was more of a pioneer. But
Cartier-Bresson was one of the first to put a Leica at the service of such a
high level of conscious political and cultural subversion. After all, he
emerged from an extraordinary environment.
A sympathetic schoolmaster turned Bresson loose, as a teenager in Paris, in
his office library. The youth devoured Dostoevsky, Hardy, Schopenhauer, Marx,
Romain Rolland, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Freud, Proust and Joyce. He began to study
painting. He came under the intellectual influence of the Surrealists. In an
interview, Cartier-Bresson remarked many years later: "I was marked, not by
Surrealist painting, but by the conceptions of Breton, [which] satisfied me a
great deal; the role of spontaneous expression and of intuition and, above
all, the attitude of revolt."
That "attitude of revolt" is one of the more enduring legacies of Surrealism.
Breton and his colleagues--Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, Benjamin Péret, René
Crevel, Robert Desnos and others--charted out a distinct path for themselves:
against official French culture and civilization; for the spontaneous, the
unexpected, the unconscious, the irrational. Breton and the others roamed the
streets looking for the marvels that lay within and beneath the banal.
HEGEL, MARX AND COMMUNISM
A friend of Cartier-Bresson recalls: "What is remarkable ... is that we
discovered at the same time ... most of the things that would become essential
to us a little bit later: Cubist painting, Negro art, the Surrealist movement,
the poetry of Rimbaud and Lautréamont, James Joyce, the poetry of Blake, the
philosophy of Hegel, Marx and communism." These friends habituated the jazz
clubs and brothels, seeking "a certain dizziness and a certain convulsion....
In a spirit of burning purity."
For Cartier-Bresson, the Surrealist example "propelled him into the world of
the dispossessed, the marginal, and the illicit, which he embraced as his own"
(Galassi). In 1930, he set off for French West Africa, where he made a living
hunting, with an acetylene lamp. He became ill and nearly died. He came away
with a hatred of colonialism and a greater feeling for the dispossessed. He
had discovered the camera and abandoned painting: "The adventurer in me felt
obliged to testify with a quicker instrument than the brush to the scars of
the world."
Galassi writes: "Beginning in 1932 and for the next three years he pursued
photography voraciously." He took photographs in Paris and Marseilles and he
traveled abroad: to eastern Europe, to Italy, Spain and Spanish Morocco, and
finally to Mexico. His photos from Spain, where revolution broke out in 1931,
and from Mexico are perhaps the most extraordinary: violent, sensual and
rebellious. He sought out "the most backward areas and the poorest
neighborhoods," but he wasn't, at this point, sentimental or lyrical about the
poor. The photos tell the truth: life is strange, complicated, fascinating.
The times themselves were filled with great and terrible events. The faces and
bodies of people even going about their daily lives reflected that.
What an extraordinary visual sense Cartier-Bresson demonstrated in those early
photos! Contemporary critics marvel at his ability to capture the so-called
decisive moment. Of course, a good eye is essential. And physical agility, and
quickness.
The training as a painter proved invaluable. Cartier-Bresson's photos are
unthinkable without Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism. Again, not only from the
purely formal point of view, but in terms of those artists' wit and visual
`dexterity,' and their breaking down of the barriers between high and low
culture.
The photos from 1932-34, in particular, have an effortless strangeness about
them. They employ the Surrealist strategy of dépaysement (literally, changing
country or changing milieu): objects and people are uprooted from their normal
contexts in order to release poetic and irrational qualities. Take, for
example, the child in Valencia (1933) against the peeling whitewashed wall. Is
he in the throes of ecstasy, agony, or both? In fact, he's watching a ball
that he's thrown up in the air. But Cartier-Bresson has caught something,
through a deliberate dislocation, which is very difficult to describe in
words.
In his essay, Galassi comments: "Every amateur snapshooter knows that
photographs rarely turn out as expected. Cartier-Bresson learned to anticipate
and exploit this transformation, with an intelligence and talent that are,
quite simply, astonishing.... Cartier-Bresson's best photographs arrive at a
new, unforeseen destination.... In theory this artifice must be accomplished
at the expense of reality, and indeed so it is in most Surrealist art.
Cartier-Bresson has disproven this theory. The more radically his photographs
transform his subjects, the more decisively they transpose to the pictorial
invention the unreconstructed vitality of the world it describes."
In other words, the strangeness of the photographs brings out the underlying
strangeness (contradictoriness) of reality. This is not done, in the best
photos, in an arbitrary fashion, but in correspondence with the laws governing
the world of inanimate and animate objects. Something essential is revealed
through the very process of estrangement.
A PRODUCT OF HISTORY
But Cartier-Bresson's breathtaking visual sense was not merely the result of a
biological predisposition or the Surrealist influence; it was a product of
history too.
In addition to possessing an arsenal of strategies--dislocation,
juxtaposition, etc.--one has to know where the defining moments take place and
when, and who and what is worth photographing. One has to have a feeling for
material and spiritual contradiction. One has to have a feeling for the poor
and the suffering. This Cartier-Bresson derived from an intellectual and
political milieu, from "Hegel, Marx and communism."
During part of his stay in Mexico City, Cartier-Bresson lived with Langston
Hughes. In early 1935 he left for New York City. Another friend recalls:
"Cartier-Bresson was enamored of Harlem. He spent days, evenings, and nights
there.... We would trudge from club to club and listen to marvelous bands....
But with some of Cartier-Bresson's intellectual black friends I used to get
into scraps about the Bolshevik Revolution. To them, Lenin was a hero and a
saint whose role in history was not supposed to be challenged.... [T]o
Cartier-Bresson the Communist movement was the bearer of history, of mankind's
future--especially in those years, when Hitler had saddled Germany and when a
civil war was about to explode in Spain."
From 1936 to 1939, Cartier-Bresson devoted a considerable amount of time to
film-making. He worked as an assistant to Jean Renoir during the making of La
Vie est à nous [Life is Ours], a propaganda film for the Communist Party made
for the Popular Front election campaign of May 1936. In March 1937, he took a
position as a staff photographer for Ce Soir, a Stalinist evening daily paper
edited by Louis Aragon. The latter had broken with Breton in 1932 and
ultimately became a Stalinist functionary of the worst sort. Such work can
only have had a generally dispiriting effect on Bresson. The Popular Front
government, far from introducing socialism, proved to be a noose around the
neck of the French working class.
With the outbreak of the war, Cartier-Bresson joined the French army. He was
captured soon after and spent nearly three years as a prisoner. On his third
attempt at escape, he succeeded and made his way to Paris where he joined the
underground.
After the war, he turned his attentions to photojournalism. Galassi, in his
1979 essay, commented: "But his outlook had been tempered by a demoralizing
political struggle, by the brutality of his long captivity, and, not least, by
the personal and artistic maturity he had earned. He recalls now that the war
marked a break in his life, as indeed it did for many other artists and
writers, especially those on the left who had shared the enthusiasms and
defeats of the mid- and late thirties."
Here we see Stalinism's destructive impact on yet another artist.
Of course, an artist grows up and he can't take the same pictures at forty
that he did at 23 or 24. But something more is involved in this case. A
domestication has taken place. The photographs suggest "an ongoing narrative";
the photographer is resigned to things continuing as they are. And, as Breton
wrote, "To condemn the subversive is to condemn everything that is not
absolutely resigned."
Cartier-Bresson's later photographs, on the whole, are less interesting than
the early ones. The conscious intervention of the photographer plays an
increasingly smaller role. The pictures become less personal, more lyrical;
they imply a "more neutral or familiar view of the world" (Galassi).
Compare the photograph of the prostitutes taken in Calle Cuauhtemocztin,
Mexico in 1934 to the 1954 picture of the Moscow workers' canteen. The latter
is more developed, distanced, all-inclusive, not so insolent. Cartier-Bresson
said in 1952 he was no longer a dilettante. But isn't it tragic--and a fitting
image of the artists' situation in the middle of the twentieth century--that
his maturation should coincide with the onset of political stagnation, so that
he confused one with the other?