« Photography: Cartier-Bresson Retrospective »

Henri Cartier-Bresson NYC 1956During April the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) launched an exhibition of the works of renowned photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.

MY CONNECTION. When I was in college, one semester I took a journalism class and a film class in back-to-back lectures on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The journalism  class covered the works of various photojournalists, the most memorable to me being Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004). After we reviewed his striking photographic images one wintry morning, I remember going to film class to begin our immersion in Jean Renoir (1894-1979) and his magnificent film The Rules of the Game (a biting satire of French society on the cusp of WWII). Later, in the process of researching and writing my paper on that film, I learned that Cartier-Bresson was a friend of Renoir’s and played an English servant in that film. I was giddy with the discovery of that coincidence. In one impressionable day of my youth I experienced the works of what would, over time, prove to be two of my favorite artists in their respective mediums … and discovered their connection. I still remember the thrill of borrowing my professor's copy of Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment (a rare book now worth several hundred dollars), just as I still remember my first viewing of Renoir's The Rules of the Game in a darkened and drafty college lecture hall.

HOPING TO GET TO MOMA. I have not been to the current MOMA Cartier-Bresson retrospective, but I hope to make it there before it closes at the end of June. Upon reviewing some of the images featured by MOMA, I dug out my old journalism notebooks from college. On the first page was a quote that MOMA features on the exhibition website:

 “It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us.”

—Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1952

I also refreshed my memory on what I found at the time to be some of the more interesting points of the lecture. My notes included:

• Cartier-Bresson wanted to be a painter and studied with some of the European masters of the 1920’s
• He did not try his eye at photography until 1932
• His photographic work spanned early 1930s to mid 1970s
• Cartier-Bresson was a master of the camera angle... his point of view is what made him unique
• Surprisingly, he did not develop his own photographic prints
• He was (and still is) considered a master of the art of photography, but there are critics who claim his images lack an emotional connection with the people, places and events that he photographed
• He described photography as “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event, as well as the precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.”
• On why photography became his passion, he said it enabled him to “reach eternity through the moment”

Here a few of my favorite Cartier-Bresson images: