Henri Cartier-Bresson - The Modern Century

Recently, I went to a retrospective exhibition of Henri Cartier-Bresson's lifetime work called - The Modern Century. It was very comprehensive and very informative. Here are the notes on the exhibition by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) -- You can view complete text and pictures at SFMOMA website.

Introduction

An innovative artist, trailblazing photojournalist, and quintessential world traveler, Henri Cartier-Bresson ranks among the most accomplished and original figures in the history of photography. His inventive images of the early 1930s helped define the creative potential of the medium, and his uncanny ability to capture life on the run made his work synonymous with "the decisive moment." This major retrospective offers a fresh look at Cartier-Bresson's entire career, revealing him as one of the great portraitists of the 20th century and one of its keenest observers of the global theater of human affairs.

Henri Cartier-Bresson began traveling in 1930, at the age of twenty-two. For nearly half a century he was on the road most of the time, and the geographical range of his work is notoriously wide. Its historical range is just as broad—from ancient patterns of preindustrial life to our contemporary era of ceaseless technological change. In the realm of photography Cartier-Bresson's work presents a uniquely rich, far-reaching, and challenging account of the modern century.

The two most important developments in photography in the first half of the twentieth century were the emergence of lasting artistic traditions and the rise of mass-circulation picture magazines. Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) was a leading figure in both domains. In the early 1930s he helped to define photographic modernism, using a handheld camera to snatch beguiling images from fleeting moments of everyday life. After World War II he turned to photojournalism, and the magic and mystery of his early work gave way to an equally uncanny clarity and completeness.

Before the dominance of television, most people saw the world through the eyes of picture magazines. Early in Cartier-Bresson's postwar career, his photographs of Gandhi's funeral and the Communist revolution in China were journalistic scoops. But the vast majority of his photographs describe things that happen every day, for his essential subject was society and culture—civilization. This retrospective exhibition—the first since the photographer's death—draws extensively on the collection and generous cooperation of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, in Paris.

Early Work

The quickness and mobility of handheld cameras spawned one of the most fruitful artistic traditions that took shape in photography between the two world wars. These new cameras didn’t merely fix the motion of the subject; they also freed the photographer from virtually all constraints. With a camera in his hand and a few rolls of film in his pocket, Cartier-Bresson never needed to decide if he was working or if he was just living.
Cartier-Bresson was a master of two leading strategies of photography in the 1920s—celebrating action by freezing it and turning the world into elegant patterns. His most original early pictures transform reality even more decisively. They reinvent the life of the street as Surrealist theater -- surprising, mysterious, and compelling than the world we know.


After the War, End of an Era
Cartier-Bresson’s work of the early 1930s is one of the great innovative episodes of modern art. It belongs to a world in which Surrealism was still a fresh adventure, before the worst of the Great Depression, before the rise of Fascism and the demise of Republican Spain, and before the Nazi occupation of France and Cartier-Bresson’s own harsh experience of World War II.

Things were very different after the war—and so was Cartier-Bresson. He found in photojournalism a productive framework for his passionate engagement with the rapidly changing world. The pictures in this section are typical of his new style; each frames a small group of characters in a scene of stunning simplicity.

Old Worlds: East

Many of Cartier-Bresson’s pictures could have been made centuries ago, if he and photography had existed then. They lovingly describe age-old patterns of life, untouched by modern industry and commerce. This and the following two sections explore that theme in Asia, throughout Europe and the West, and in the photographer’s native France.
Except as a prisoner of war, Cartier-Bresson never endured the hard physical labor that was unavoidable in the ancient societies he so much admired, and after a youthful adventure in Africa he never again photographed in his own country’s colonies. But his keen attention to particulars redeems the strain of romantic nostalgia in his work, and his vision of premodern societies is but one anchor of a historical panorama that reaches well into our era of contraptions and consumerism.

Old Worlds: West

Cartier-Bresson photographed many landscapes, but he may never have made a picture of untouched nature. All of the places he describes have been inhabited and shaped by man, and each bears the mark of a particular culture or cultures, which in turn may have been shaped by the land.

Old Worlds: France

France belongs to the West, of course. But Cartier-Bresson’s exploration of his own country yielded a harvest of photographs so abundant and vital that it deserves special attention.

New Worlds: U.S.A.

Cartier-Bresson photographed more extensively in the United States than in any other country except his native France, but his American pictures are among his least well known.
In principle, the clarity and balance of Cartier-Bresson’s postwar style went hand in hand with a posture of neutral observation. But his image of the United States incorporates a distinctly critical thread, alert to American vulgarity, greed, and racism.

New Worlds: USSR

Cartier-Bresson was the first Western photographer to be admitted to the Soviet Union after the death of Josef Stalin, in 1953. The pictures he made in the summer of 1954 were news in themselves, and several magazines reproduced quite a few of them. When he returned to the U.S.S.R. nearly two decades later, in 1972 and 1973, his image of Soviet life developed a new dimension—grim, barren, and bleak.

Photo-Essay: The Great Leap Forward, China. 1958

The photo-essay—a group of pictures about a single subject, usually accompanied by captions—was a staple of photojournalism throughout Cartier-Bresson’s career. This and the following section present such essays in abbreviated form.
In 1958 Cartier-Bresson undertook an ambitious campaign to photograph the Great Leap Forward, Mao Tse-tung’s intensive program of forced industrialization. He worked steadily for four months in China, and although he was closely monitored by the authorities, he returned with a very substantial body of work, rich in concrete detail.
The story was widely disseminated through magazines in Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, as well as the United States—usually with splashy color spreads similar to those in the issue of Life presented here. In 1964 nearly fifty photographs made in 1958 appeared in Cartier-Bresson’s small paperback book on China, but otherwise the project has received little attention.

Photo-Essay: Bankers Trust Company, New York. 1960

Around 1960 the informal style of photographs made with handheld cameras, popularized by magazines, also began to appear in the annual reports of American corporations. Many freelance photojournalists welcomed the new source of commissions, and an assignment to illustrate the 1960 annual report of Bankers Trust Company granted Cartier-Bresson access to the inner workings of the bank, which otherwise would have been hard to penetrate.
Neither Chinese Communism nor American capitalism conformed to Cartier-Bresson’s idea of a just society. Yet he carefully studied specific circumstances and activities and described them patiently without resorting to rhetorical effect. Only the bosses are regarded with a skeptical eye.

Portraits

Cartier-Bresson was one of the great portraitists of the twentieth century. Throughout his far-flung travels he was alert to every opportunity to add to his pantheon of notable people—mostly artists and writers—which eventually numbered nearly one thousand.
He preferred to picture his sitters at home. When asked how long the session would take, he liked to answer, “Longer than the dentist but shorter than the psychoanalyst.”

Beauty

Cartier-Bresson’s essential subject was social life. But he also had a keen eye for beauty—especially in women—and for photography’s capacity to produce lovely images from whatever is at hand, no matter how banal or ugly.

Encounters and Gatherings

The street is a theater, admission free. Our clothing, faces, and gestures tell the stories of our lives—as individuals and as members of communities. The handheld camera—nearly as quick as the eye—is an ideal tool for observing the spectacle.
Cartier-Bresson’s talent stood on two legs—one photographic, one human. He was exceptionally good at anticipating how the world would be transformed as it passed through the lens into the image. And wherever he found himself—among peasants or kings, saints or villains—he was quick to grasp who was who and what was what.

Modern Times

More than two centuries ago, Britain’s Industrial Revolution marked one of many beginnings of modernity. Born when the automobile and the airplane were still in their infancy, Cartier-Bresson never lost his affection for old traditions, yet he did not shrink from change. For him modernity arrived in the 1950s, with the triumph of consumption and leisure, and his later pictures fluently describe its vulgar depredations, messy accumulations, and sprawling hedonism.

------------------------------------------

"Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again."

-Henry Cartier-Bresson-