July 16, 2009 at 8:43 pm
Henri Cartier-Bresson at MoMA, 2010
July 10, 2009 at 1:02 am
Henri Cartier-Bresson, quite possibly my favorite photographer of all time, is going to have a 300-photograph retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in April 2010. Just as Richard Avedon is being recognized as more than just a fashion photographer, but as an influential force who helped shaped American culture, it seems as though Cartier-Bresson, too, may finally get his place in the annals of modern art’s masters.
It’s organized by Peter Galassi, the chief curator of Photographs at MoMA, who, in 1987 organized an exhibit of Cartier-Bresson’s early work. In the forward to the accompanying catalogue, Galassi correctly points out that Cartier-Bresson has been more or less pushed into a corner where he is either placed within a historical context (one of the first photographers to use the small, portable 35mm Leica instead of large, heavy cameras), or described in the context of the “decisive moment” photographer, both of which scratch the surface of his important, complex, and emotive œuvre. It’s very easy to describe his work along the simplistic terms of a stealthy French photojournalist who captured decisive moments around the world with his Leica, yet it completely undermines his position as one of the 20th century’s preeminent photographers, one who was completely in touch with his time and many of the leading figures who helped shaped it.
I find the term photojournalist to be deceiving, because I think it’s quite self-evident in the work that Cartier-Bresson cared little about reporting on news events. He sent himself around the world, never in search of a particular story, but in search of the human condition. And whatever he found, no matter how banal or exquisite, he placed upon it a formally rigorous composition, elevating it to high art. Nothing was too mundane to be photographed. What I have always appreciated most about his photography is that a sensitive eye and careful intuition can turn anything into a work of art. His pictures all have a harmonious balance, even when the scene depicted is in disorder. Children play along the Berlin Wall, through the dilapidated streets of Mexican cities, or the poor suburbs of Paris. Unlike the later generation of “photojournalists,” such as Robert Frank or Garry Winogrand, Cartier-Bresson did not allow chaos to create a chaotic picture. That is not to suggest that the compositions of Frank or Winogrand are any less precise than Cartier-Bresson’s; they serve different purposes for different photographers. And it can be argued that all three of the aforementioned photographers used the street as a backdrop upon which an interesting human drama could unfold — a drama that might give the viewer hints of the entire picture, but would never be as didactic as a photographer covering a particular story, or trying to assert a certain position.
Example: In 1954, Cartier-Bresson was the first Western photographer admitted into the Soviet Union. The pictures that ensued are not what one might expect. Cartier-Bresson was never interested in creating politically charged or inflammatory pictures. It’s true that he was accompanied by a government-appointed translator, but I believe that the pictures would have been the same had he been left to his own devices. Perhaps these photos worked against Western Cold War propaganda in that they offered a view into Communist states that did not conform to the rhetoric that was being perpetuated abroad. There are many pictures that are particular to Russia (the portraits of Stalin, or the traditional Soviet costume and architecture), yet the majority of the photos could have been taken anywhere and have little to do with Communism, Russia, or the specifics of any particular locale, as much as they speak to Cartier-Bresson’s desire to impose upon all his subjects a rigid geometry. In Russia, he went to department stores, train stations, churches, public pools, parks, schools, markets — anywhere people would be. In his native Paris or in distant Japan, he photographed throughout the same locations, never so much interested in dissecting the particularities of any specific culture, so much as he was interested in allowing scenes to unfold before his lens. As he singled them out through his meticulous (yet unfiltered and intuitive) photographic process, he elevated them to the level of high art.
In many instances he uses people as design elements, a sort of antithesis to portraiture. Yet he is never malicious in his intent, sometimes taking the most tender and personal portraits of his subjects. The photos are always captivating and intriguing in and of themselves because there always seems to be other forces at work outside of the picture frame. People are often placed in illogical positions or within contexts that cannot be explained. Many of his photos seem stranger than fiction, and they accept that the only story they tell is one imagined by the viewer.
It soon becomes clear that Cartier-Bresson enjoyed taking photographs that were not only aesthetically pleasing, but also imbued with a mystery, which, when viewed as a collective whole, begin to unveil humanity in all its forms, from life and death, to love and sadness. His life’s work encompasses every human emotion and condition, regardless of any cultural conditions or assumptions.
Statue of Liberty
July 6, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Apparently the Statue of Liberty’s crown officially re-opened this past July 4th. But it’s sold out for the rest of August.. Tickets are only $3!
David Campany, Photography and Cinema
June 25, 2009 at 12:01 am
I’m reading a very good David Campany book and found this excerpt to be particularly interesting:
Still Photography, Still
“In photography something of this loss of faith in speed can be measured against the steady waning of interest in the instantaneous snapshot. As we have seen, it was only from the 1920s, in the shadow of cinema and with the growing dominance of print journalism, that photography became the modulator of the concept of the event. Good photo-reporters followed the action, aiming to be in the right place at the right time. This lasted until the late 1960s, with the standardized introduction of portable video cameras for news coverage. Over the last few decades the representation of events has fallen increasingly to video and was then dispersed across a variety of platforms. As television overshadowed print media, photography lost its position as a medium of primary information. It even lost its monopoly over stillness to video and then digital video, which provides frame grabs for newspapers as easily as it provides moving footage for television and the Internet. Today, photographers often prefer to wait until an event is over. They are as likely to attend to the aftermath because photography is, in relative terms, at the aftermath of culture. What we see first ‘live’ or at least in real time on television might be revisited by photographers depicting the stillness of traces.
In this way immersion in subject matter has given way to distance. Sharp reflexes have given way to careful strategy. The small format has given way to the large. Nimbleness and a ‘quick eye’ are passed over as photographers attune to the longer wave rhythms of the social world. As a consequence, the photographic image becomes less about the ‘hot’ decisiveness of the shutter and more about the ‘cold’ stoicism of the lens. Where the boundaries between the still and moving image are breaking down the photographic image circulates promiscuously, dissolving into the hybrid mass of mainstream visual culture. But where photography attempts to separate itself out and locate a particular role for itself, it is decelerated, pursuing a self-consciously sedate, unhurried pace. Slower working procedures are producing images more akin to monuments than moments. Many of the defining photographic projects of the last decade or so have been depictions of aftermaths and traces in the most literal sense. They include projects as diverse as Joel Meyerowitz’s documentation of Ground Zero in New York; Paul Seawright’s and Simon Norfolk’s images of the traces of war in Afghanistan; Robert Polidori’s records of the damage wrought by Katrina on New Orleans; and Sophie Ristelhueber’s images of the sabotaged Kuwaiti oilfields in 1991. In all of these examples photography has re-engaged its forensic function, although none of these photographers makes images that resemble police pictures. Instead, forensic attention to traces is spliced with an almost classical sense of place typical of traditional landscape photography. Just as the medium has been sidelined from events, these image-makers find their outlet away from the popular press, in the expanded field of fine-art photography. In parallel to this, others have focused on the time before the event. At first glance, An-My Lê’s series 29 Palms (2003-4) look like battlefield photographs from a contemporary war zone. In fact, they document the military preparations of US Marines on American soil for conflict in the Middle East. This is not the ‘theatre of war’ but its rehearsal studio.
An-My Lê, Night Operations, 2003-4, from the series 29 Palms.
That many photographers now work in these ‘late’ ways is not just a consequence of their coming to terms with the marginal status of the medium. It is also a question of coming to terms with the idea that documentary and photojournalism are now thoroughly allegorical. These photographers know full well that their restrained images are read through the barrage of mass-media coverage of the events they so studiously avoid.”
© David Campany. Photography and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2008.