Cartier-Bresson review in new New Yorker

[thompsonkirk]

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There's an interesting review of Cartier-Bresson by Peter Schjeldahl in the new New Yorker, in conjunction with MOMA show. Interesting but skewed. It p***ed me off. But I think it's worth reading if you don't buy into its main criticism.

 

HCB didn't impose the cold classicism of Poussin on photography but pretty much did the opposite: he humanized modernism & surrealism. Into their heady abstractness he introduced street photography's immediate humanism-of-the-moment. Instead of perpetuating classicism he offered wonderful gifts of modernist form & humanized content, coalescing for just a fraction of a second. Major contribution to art history; & what better name than Decisive Moment?

 

Kirk

[giordano]

Fortunately for the rest of us it's online at Henri Cartier-Bresson at MOMA, review : The New Yorker.

 

Unlike Kirk I think Schjeldahl gets it about right. In the first paragraph he writes

Nearly every picture displays the classical panache—the fullness, the economy—of a painting by Poussin. Any half-dozen of them would have engraved their author’s name in history.

I don't read that as "cold classicism" but as an acute consciousness of all the elements in the picture and their relationships to each other, nothing superfluous, nothing without significance, all brought into what is ultimately revealed as a harmonious composition no matter how chaotic it may appear at first. This can be a weakness in a photojournalist - the magnificence of the images can distract from the story and the from emotions of the people in it - and I think it's significant that while we remember C-B's pictures we've mostly forgotten the details of the stories they illustrate and the journals that first published them.

[Jaws]

Interesting read. Its an opinion, but the article I found made some good points and added to my thoughts when it comes to H C-B. That's a good thing.

[Michael Hiles]

I have not seen the show at MOMA.

 

The New Yorker article is an opinion which I mainly do not share. One core statement is:

 

"He rendered a world that... richly satisfies the eye and the mind, while numbing the heart."

 

Cartier's pictures may numb the writer's heart but not mine. Cartier appears to have seen and reacted to the world much as I do. He did not seem to share the world before his eye, so much as observe it and capture it at just the moment in time that was the apex of form and content.

 

The writer evidently thinks that Cartier has a condecending view of Americans. His American pictures do not say this to me at all. My suspicion is that Cartier was happy being French, and saw the world - including the U.S. - from that perspective. I wonder if the writer shares the common condecension of many Americans towards the French.

 

Whatever, the New Yorker article does not add much to my understanding of this master artist.

[Gentleman Villain]

The impression that the article gave me was that Bresson was a rich kid that got to spend lots of time playing with his camera while promoting communism and visiting prostitutes.

[wilfredo]

This article attempts to cover a lot of terrain in presenting HCB. I found it a bit too typical of reviews. I did not get the sense that the author had an understanding of HCB's work but rather gathered information on HCB and threw something together for the magazine. However, I appreciated the following quote regarding the decisive moment: "He said he suddenly realized that photography could reach eternity through the moment.” That resonates with me. He remains an inspiration.

[stunsworth]

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Compared to the other French "humanist' photographers I've always felt that HCB was more of an outsider. He rarely seems to be involved with his subjects in a was that say Doineau, Ronis and Boubat do. There's a much cooler emotional feel to his work that with theirs, That's not a criticism, but just an observation regarding his style.

 

Of course I haven't seen the current exhibition, but I did see the huge retrospective in Paris some years ago, and I also saw the scrapbook exhibition a while ago.

[delander †]

I found the review interesting, and although I have not seen the exhibtion I have just purchased the catalogue. I have seen many of the photos before and enjoy them and the text in the catalogue is more comprehnesive than I have read before on HCB. He seems to have come from a well-off family but from the catalogue text he did spend an enormous amount of time travelling and he must have spent much of that sitting and waiting in far off places for instructions from clients.

 

As a chap with a scientific background I am not deeply artistic and am sometimes astounded by what others (including the reviewer) see in the visual arts.

 

HCB evidently shot more than 14000 rolls of film which amount to some 500,000 or more photographs yet we rarely see more than 500 of them. I dont know if that tells me anything or not.

 

Jeff

[alun]

A fascinating article -- and refreshing to read something about HC-B that risks dissenting from or questioning 'standard' views. However, to condemn HC-B because his "genius is less in what he photographed than in where he placed himself to photograph it, incorporating peculiarly eloquent backgrounds and surroundings" -- well, Schjeldahl doesn't quite 'condemn', but he does at times find the pictures too beautiful -- is surely to condemn much if not all of photography.

 

On the other hand, as Steve U put it (and well) there *is* a cooler emotional feel to much of HC-B's work....as well (and perhaps reflecting) his sometimes autocratic intellectualising of photography.

 

I shall read the piece again because I think it has valuable (and in some respects challenging) things to say about HC-B.

 

But to say that HC-B didn't "develop" but simply passed from greater beauty to greater beauty seems absurd: it's like criticising the Beethoven late quartets for having too much string music in them, or Bach for having written too much contrapuntal music....

[thompsonkirk]

Alun, those are wonderful comparisons!

 

Kirk

[giordano]

But to say that HC-B didn't "develop" but simply passed from greater beauty to greater beauty seems absurd: it's like criticising the Beethoven late quartets for having too much string music in them, or Bach for having written too much contrapuntal music....

 

Yes, up to a point. But I'm not sure Beethoven's a good analogy: it's easy to tell early Beethoven from late Beethoven, but given a dozen C-B pictures taken from the 30s to the 70s could we assign them to the right decades just by their styles, without relying on details such as people's clothes and the technical quality of the image?

[Guest joewehry]

One of the picture / descriptions I am confused about in the New Yorker article

 

"Let one tour de force stand for many: “Valencia, Spain” (1933), which finds a boy in a strangely balletic pose against a battered wall, his eyes mysteriously raised (following the flight of a ball, which we don’t see). The subject piques and charms, but what makes the picture great is the gorgeousness of the wall, with its weary testimony to times long past."

 

Please correct me if I am wrong, but I could have sworn in a documentary I have heard HCB describe that image as a blind boy feeling his way along the wall. And one of the things HCB found interesting was the worn paint along the wall which told a history of countless others feeling their way along the same wall.

 

Does anyone know the correct history / subject /description of this image, which is usually shown as a singular boy, one hand along a worn wall, with head turned slightly upwards? Is he tossing a ball, or blind feeling his way?

 

Thanks for the clarification, and if the New Yorker author is incorrect (surprising since the New Yorker is known for its fact-checking) then this needs to be addressed.

 

Cheers

[nhabedi]

Yes, up to a point. But I'm not sure Beethoven's a good analogy: it's easy to tell early Beethoven from late Beethoven, but given a dozen C-B pictures taken from the 30s to the 70s could we assign them to the right decades just by their styles, without relying on details such as people's clothes and the technical quality of the image?

 

Good point. Except that I'd leave out the 30s. I'd agree that his style after WWII has been pretty much the same until he died. His work in the 30s is different.

[Michael Hiles]

On the other hand, as Steve U put it (and well) there *is* a cooler emotional feel to much of HC-B's work....as well (and perhaps reflecting) his sometimes autocratic intellectualising of photography.

 

But to say that HC-B didn't "develop" but simply passed from greater beauty to greater beauty seems absurd

 

Cartier seems to have been an observer rather than a participator. Even though his pictures are mechanically captured in a fraction of a second, they often appear that they could have been sketched - which he always said he was doing with a camera. When drawing, one does not participate as "part of the action". But autocratic intelectualizing seem very harsh to me.

 

Cartier used a 50mm lens for most of his pictures. He apparently carried a 90mm and 35mm lens, and occasionally used the 90mm, much less often the 35mm. The 50mm and 90mm provide a certain distance, an arms length vantage point. This can be seen in the pictures, and I can see it in my efforts (I love my 50mm and 90mm).

 

Many today favour very wide angle lenses, and in my view this results in a tendency towards "organic" pictures rather than cerebral shots. They eye is in the middle of the scene. With the longer lenses the eye is on the edge of the scene. I am not sure I can say this better, but I know it when I see it.

 

And I think the pictures from the late 1920s and 1930s are different from the post war pictures. The surrealist influence is evident. And I think the post war pictures did evolve. And that should be no surprise. Look at Picasso over his career, or Matisse. If an artist does not evolve he/she is missing something and may forfeit the right to be called great.

 

In my view.