Born in France in 1908, Henri Cartier-Bresson was a photojournalist, artist, and portraitist. He marked his own style and an era, and his name continues to resonate strongly. He captured encounters and situations like no one else. Spontaneous photographs that led him to be one of the pioneers of street photography, and his works are considered, to this day, authentic icons of image and popular culture.
20 years after his death in 2004, an exhibition created in collaboration with the Bucerius Kunstforum in Hamburg and curated by Ulrich Pohlmann is presented. The exhibition, which can be seen until January 26, contains his first surrealist photographs and cinematographic works, political reports, portraits of artists and writers, as well as later snapshots of daily life. Composed of 240 original prints from the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, and a selection of publications in magazines and books, it focuses fully on his most celebrated career, between 1930 and 1970. It should be noted that, shortly before his death, the artist ordered to prohibit any type of copy of his images.
The exhibition, which is being a success in terms of visitors, takes a journey through time through ten thematic and chronological sections, which allow appreciating the social, political, and artistic changes of the 20th century through the eyes of the one considered, along with Brassai or Brandt, one of the fathers of modern photography, and the most popular of photographers along with names like Robert Capa, with whom he would found the Magnum Agency, and would establish bridges towards an art that was no longer so connected with painting.
Considered by many the eye of the century, Cartier-Bresson is the father of the concept of the decisive moment in photography, becoming, directly or indirectly, the father of modern photojournalism and street photography, and being a witness and documentarian of the most important fragments of the history of the contemporary world.
The precision of the instant was his trademark; the whimsical play of lines and curves, verticals and horizontals, the obsessive use of the rule of thirds and the golden ratio, the magnificent use of space, the mastery of composition, the detail in the placement of elements... Many virtues can be attributed to his good work, but above all, the precision in capturing moments stands out. He was prepared and had the instinct and the ability to anticipate events.
This unique virtue was complemented by his love for geometry and composition learned from his years as a painting student. He never cropped images and respected the framing to the maximum. He always presented himself as an observer, without intruding or interfering with the elements. There was a natural austerity in his shots: his idea was that less is more, and he lavished minimalism and neatness from a few elements, avoiding over-burdening the image too much.
Respectful of the use of natural light, he was also respectful of the environment and the atmosphere that would permeate the image. He liked black and white because it emphasized geometry, and he enjoyed genre scenes and images that portrayed daily life. He told small stories, sought beauty in contemplation, and always started from elegance.
Photography, for him, was like drawing a freehand sketch with intuition; the organization had to be rigorous in its forms and he considered that "to photograph is to put eye, mind, and heart in the same line of sight". He appreciated authenticity as the greatest virtue of photography and always sought living images, in tension between movement and stability. His is the phrase "the only true art resides in the humanity of your reflection, in your gaze and in coincidence". Life is very fluid through his eyes, and images disappear with a blink, they literally escape our grasp.
A photographer faithful to Leica, he was a painter, draftsman, filmmaker, traveler, reporter, photojournalist, surrealist, communist, controversial, and socially committedOf a marked humanist character,his snapshots distill anthropology, and its beginnings are framed within the surrealist movement of the New Vision. Cartier-Bresson did not stay long in said movement on Capa's advice, but he never completely abandoned that particular point of view. The artist always fostered an apolitical image in front of the media, despite actively participating in various left-wing movements.
The decisive moment gives us the idea of the image in constant movement, the image that changes every second, the fleeting life that escapes us. In 1957, he published Images à la sauvette (Images on the sly), published in English as The decisive moment. Then came the Magnum Agency, created with Robert Capa and David Seymour in 1947. Its creation marked a before and after in photojournalism, and photographers began to be sent to conflict zones with the mission of documenting events for the press.
Cartier-Bresson and Spain
The photographer was sent to Spain on two occasions. First, in 1933 by Vu magazine to photograph the elections. The same year, he presented his first exhibition in our country at the Ateneo de Madrid, where he presented his most surreal images taken in Seville and Valencia. In 1936, he became involved in the Civil War, and in 1937, he filmed Victory of Life in Madrid, a documentary about the medical care provided to Republican soldiers. The film supported the Second Republic and was very well received by the French left.
In his philosophy, he emphasizes that life is one and is forever. Moments are unrepeatable and vanish. He considered himself a terrible documentarian and was extremely bored by photojournalism. His training came from the surrealist influences of art and he considered himself one of them, a full surrealist. He did not see himself as a reporter or a journalist. Cartier-Bresson sought in his images a conjunction between the theme expressed in a snapshot and the relationship it had with forms. Rhythm, relationship between elements and geometry; structures, shadows and patterns. He sought order, yes, but he left it to chance for everything to seem to be in its place.
Facts, by themselves, were not interesting to him. Evocation was the name he used to talk about his point of view. He believed that photographs must contain a story, they must be able to be looked at for more than two minutes, again and again, and that is a long time...
His portraits of Mauriac, Matisse, Braque, Coco Chanel, Eleanor Sears, Colette, Ezra Pound, and Camus are famous. Portraits were difficult for him, as the model consciously agreed to be photographed; it was not an improvisation. He urged to portray the animal in its habitat, he liked to enter houses, get to know their pets, their surroundings... the camera must be placed between the skin and the clothes, and the photographer must be like a cat, observing from a corner without interacting, without participating in the scene. All of that was a way of undressing the model, of violating them, something the artist resolved with trust and commitment to reality.
Everything is a maybe. You wait for the moment and there are no guarantees of anything. You cannot bet as an artist that you have achieved it. The right photo, sometimes, remains in a limbo between the first shot and the last, and you lose it. Everything is instinct. A relationship is established like that of the animal and its prey. You have to be faster and go unnoticed. It is an accurate shot, like that of a sniper, who works with the whole body, contracts and relaxes with each expiation, with each heartbeat.
He considered himself anxious and impulsive, something his family and friends suffered from. The artist defined himself as someone nervous, who only relaxed when photographing. He was himself when shooting, he didn't think, he didn't feel who or what, he was just himself. One shouldn't think, that was dangerous and ruined the photograph. One shouldn't force a preconceived idea. There's no need to explain or prove anything. Things express themselves.
For Cartier-Bresson, photography was a natural evolution of drawing and painting, like an immediate sketch, with the difference that it cannot be corrected; you need to take another photographThe image starts from the first impression, from theshock, the surprise... that must be the only inspiration. What completes the work is one's own background, references, tastes, training, intellectual yearnings...And poetry is the essence of everything for him. The subtle tension between elements is the key to every good photograph.
There are no new ideas in the world, that's why they are not so important. One must seek a new order of things. Life changes every minute, and every minute is new; the world is created and destroyed at every instant. Death is always present, from the moment we are born. It is the tragic sense of life that makes it so beautiful and valuable. There are always two sides of the coin, and it is the tensions of life that move us.
What moved him to travel were the impulses and contradictions with his culture, with the point of view of the conflict. To capture the essence of a place, one must stay there for a while; it's not worth traveling just for the sake of traveling, that makes no sense. He liked to quote Rodin in interviews: "What is done with time, time respects." Foster Wallace updated the term referring to contemporary times: "The tourist knows that what he visits is always better in his absence."
Cartier-Bresson admitted that the most difficult thing was not to photograph the exotic, nor the different; the most difficult thing was always to photograph one's own environment, one's own city, one's own country. From where you live, you end up knowing too much, about us and our lives, and we are always conditioned.
He warned that our mind is a radar, and that any person is capable of taking ten good photos throughout their life, at least. The key was to keep going, to persevere, to become more and more conscious, and more and more lucid each time. A camera, in a certain sense, could be considered a weapon. It can be an instrument of propaganda, you can shout through it, you can caress, kiss, seduce... the camera becomes a machine gun, it becomes a psychoanalyst's chair.
Cartier-Bresson found in photography his greatest form of expressionHe loved and hated people, buthe considered himself an optimist,an optimist without reasons; as in the famous toast of the painter Francis Bacon, he considered himself an optimist about nothing. The reasons for being so did not matter, they did not matter at all.
The instant and the moment exist and are there, and they must be respected. There is no better celebration of life than enjoying that instant. In his interviews, the photographer also used to quote Joyce's Ulysses, specifically, its last three words, the famous "Yes! Yes! Yes!". Photography, in this way, becomes a true and resounding yes! to life.