Like Galassi, I found my expectations of Cartier-Bresson confounded. My encounters with the photographer have been through photography histories highlighting “the decisive moment” in his pre-war work. What I don’t much recall is discussion of his career as a photojournalist or his name linked to magazines such as Life, Time or Fortune. But the latter makes up the bulk of his work and in fact many of his most famous photos from the 30s - the man leaping across the puddle, the fat man strolling through a crowd of children, the families enjoying lunch on the river bank - made their first public appearance at the 1947 MoMA exhibit.
CB also made and appeared in movies - though not many, and not memorable - commercial releases for French and American audiences. He labored on behalf of international socialism, lending his talent to films supporting the French communist party and the Republicans of the Spanish Civil War. And quite daring for someone of his generation, he married an Indonesian, a classically trained dancer who often accompanied him on his travels and waited out WWII in France while he labored in a German prison camp. The problems such a marriage may have caused seem not trifling. Cartier-Bresson was from one of France’s richest families, whose sons did not marry dark-skinned colonials. Apparently the mother and daughter-in-law didn't get on well and there were probably all sorts of everyday indignities, like being refused lodging for being a mixed couple, a story related in Helmi's 1997 Fragmented Portrait.
Galassi’s upturned expectations are of a different kind and not easily explicable to someone not intimately familiar with Cartier-Bresson's work.
“The point should not be overstated: the majority of Cartier-Bresson's pictures hewed to his established format of neatly framed vignettes with a handful of characters, and it would be ludicrous to suggest that the evolution of his work had anything directly to do with Winogrand's. Nevertheless, it is unmistakable and remarkable that in the course of the 1960s Cartier-Bresson developed a more supple and flexible style, capable of rendering more complex circumstances. This is the last thing I expected to find when I embarked on this project,and I don’t pretend to understand it. But it seems to have been a corollary - perhaps indeed an expression - of Cartier-Bresson's uncertain but active engagement with awkward realities of modern times” (pp64-65).
Galassi sees CB’s work in three periods corresponding to three styles: an early period marked chiefly by spontaneity and wit, the middle photojournalist period in which every image is a well-balanced vignette, and a later period marked by “radical inclusiveness” similar to that of Winogrand. Unfortunately, he cites only two examples from this last period and they aren't all that terribly revealing of a new style. Perhaps after I spend more time looking at more photos, and perhaps learning about Winogrand, Galassi's surprise will be clearer.
-------------Galassi on the early and middle periods-------------
...Cartier-Bresson’s graphic instincts - of dynamic balance, clarity, elegance, and completeness - permeate all of the early work, endowing each picture with autonomy and weight no matter how rambunctious its imagery might be, and lending to the whole body of work a powerful cohesion. As he once put it, “The great pleasure for my Leica was to have the spare elements of a collage suddenly jump from the street into the lens (pp34-35).If many of Cartier-Bresson’s early photographs are collages ripped from the fabric of the street, the model of his postwar style is just the opposite: no matter how busy or calm the actual circumstance may have been, the image functions like a nicely proportioned stage on which a few figures have gathered to enact a tableau vivant. Like well-trained actors, they never turn their backs to the audience, and their faces and gestures are models of expressive clarity. The frame, like a proscenium, encloses the action and reveals it to the audience (p41).
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As for the images themselves, I found many of the early ones blurry or in soft focus. The mature style seems rather common. Charming enough, in historical context, but familiar. It’s a bit like watching an old movie in which many of the techniques, angles, and compositions feel somewhat cliche. I grew up reading and looking at the kind of magazines in which his photos were often featured. In fact it wouldn't be surprising if I saw some of his images as they were originally published. His style was so integral to our visual vocabulary that we have to remind ourselves that it was at one time fresh.
Also of interest is CB’s seeming indifference to the public display of his work. He claimed to have no favorites among his photos (p59), that he sent in his negatives without paying much attention to how they were used (p52), that he was in fact more interested in making the next photo. “Photography,” Galassi remarks, “had been a way of encountering and engaging the world - a way of making pictures, of course, but first and foremost a way of life. That is the bedrock truth of Cartier-Bresson's frequent assertion - perfectly reasonable, though it drove many photography enthusiasts crazy - that he was never terribly interested in the medium as such” (p60). This indifference to outcome might also be a reflection of what Galassi takes as CB’s _dis_engagement with his subjects, which he sees in comparing his American photos with those of Robert Frank. CB’s photos “aren't angry or sad. That posture of disinterested observation is what infuriated Frank, but it was indispensable to Cartier-Bresson” (p64).
-------------CB on his work-------------
It seems to me that the notion of the artists comes from the bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century. Every sensitive human being is potentially an artist. Then comes concentration, etc, etc. - Mozart and Haydn were domestic employees. As for photo-reporters, we just keep a log (p46).
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| Galassi's essay |
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| Chronology of Travels |
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| Periodical Bibliography |
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