Lincoln Kirstein said of Henri Cartier-Bresson that he was responsible for more memorable images than any other photographer of his time. He may well have been right. Who can help smiling at the leaping Parisian with his bowler-hatted straddle mirrored in a puddle (Aperture 39), or ever forget the passion unleashed upon a Gestapo informer photographed in Dessau in 1945? Cartier-Bresson produced four decades of such unforgettable images, pictures widely published in the leading illustrated magazines of the time, such as Vu, Life, Harper's Bazaar, and many others. His very personal style of photoreportage, part travelogue, part social commentary, also illustrated his more than ten books on all parts of the globe: Les danses ŕ Bali (1960), From One China to Another (1956), The Europeans (1955), The Face of Asia (1972), About Russia (1973), and others.
Almost as well known as a creator of memorable phrases, Cartier-Bresson has described the "decisive moment" aesthetic that defines his photographs. It was made possible by the 35-mm camera (Cartier-Bresson rarely used anything else), its speed and portability enabling him to catch what he called, in the title of his first book, "Images ŕ la sauvette." Translated in the English edition as The Decisive Moment, the words refer to the French slang term roughly translated as "grab shots," and describes images that stress the almost predatory intrusion of photography into the flow of time. "Photography is for me," he wrote in the introduction to Decisive Moment, "the development of a plastic medium, based on the pleasure of observing, and the ability to capture a decisive moment in a constant struggle with time."
Facile Spontaneity
This seemingly photojournalistic style influenced a whole generation of photographers--Robert Frank, Gary Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander come immediately to mind--but only a few were able to master it. The difficulty of the "decisive moment" is masked by its seeming facile spontaneity; its inherent danger is an easy deterioration into chaotic formlessness. The fragment of reality caught by the shutter requires a pictorial structure that orders its random and incidental details, yet does not destroy its naturalism. Compositions need to be efficient, yet appear to be effortless, seeming less the achievement of the photographer than the result of fortuitous circumstance. The style demands, in short, such control of pictorial space, such balance of form and content (Aperture 31, 63), that the artistry of Cartier-Bresson has rarely been approached.
The way in which Cartier-Bresson molded the photojournalistic style depended upon what the Germans call kurzlebig, that is, short-lived formations that come together by chance. Chance as an active force in artistic creation has been an important concern in modern art as early as Marcel Duchamp's 1933 Three Standard Stoppages, and was an integral part of the Surrealist program. Cartier-Bresson was affected profoundly by the concepts of Surrealism, and cites as early influences the work of Atget, Man Ray and the poetry of André Breton. "For me," he says, "the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which--in visual terms--questions and decides simultaneously." As a young man in 1922, Cartier-Bresson developed a passionate interest in painting and in 1927 and 1928 studies with the Cubist painter André Lhote. However, as the photographer Robert Capa advised him, if his photographic work was labeled as Surrealist,
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