Henri Cartier-Bresson citations
Citations
"Master of the Moment"
No artist/journalist in living memory epitomises the camera’s extraordinary affinity to the gun in its ability to draw-and-shoot and ‘hunt’ reality, as the late Henri Cartier-Bresson. The work of the French master photographer, whose ‘centenary year’ was launched a few weeks ago with a unique exhibition at the Chicago Art Institute, illustrates that genre of photography now famous as ‘the decisive moment’, drawing attention to the legendary instantaneity of his photographic method.
The Chicago exhibition has been specially curated by David Travis, to foreground Bresson’s sensibility for visual blocking and formal composition, which stemmed directly from his closeness to the works of artists and painters of the period like Picasso, de Chirico, Dali, Mondrian and his own guru Andre Lhote. But there was nothing ‘studied’ about Cartier-Bresson’s work. He believed in the accidental and the chancy moment and has been quoted as saying, “When you are photographing, there’s nothing that you’d call thinking going on.”
The leading ideologue of the Surrealist movement, André Breton — of whom Cartier-Bresson took a great portrait — wrote about his “ultra-receptive posture” to people and events, “as if he wants to help chance along; how should I say, to put himself in a state of grace with chance, so that something might happen.”
By the time Cartier-Bresson passed away (on August 2, 2004, three weeks short of his 96th birthday), he had not been taking photographs for over 30 years — and had, in fact, made several disparaging remarks about photography. Yet his aura and mystique as the ‘master of the moment’ continued.
Around 1976, he had returned to his original love, painting and drawing, assiduously learned from André Lhote, his cubist and surrealist teacher. His sketches and drawings in pencil, charcoal and India ink provide an insight to his graphic sensitivity for the contesting line, plane and texture in the same frame. Transferred on to a photograph, it performs a ‘pure’ act by remaining alert to the possibility of ‘order’ amidst the constant confusion of the visual world.