I’m a bag of nerves waiting for the moment,” Henri Cartier-Bresson once said in an interview. “It wells up and up and it explodes. It’s a physical joy — dance, time and space all combined. Yes! Yes! Yes! Like the ending of James Joyce’s
Ulysses. Seeing is everything.”
Cartier-Bresson took such pleasure in seeing because he was such a fiendishly clever observer, as a massive retrospective of his work, about to open in Edinburgh, reveals. His devouring eye and his athletic mind lit up at the balletic choreography of daily life. He had a lust for all life, however grand or humble, and he could find it with equal facility in a man’s scowl, a child’s grin or even in a glimpse of a dog nestling under a carved stone lion.
He spent his early adult years in the late 1920s training to be a painter under the Cubist artist André Lhote. Photography at the time was not yet an art, but once he began taking photographs, in Africa in 1931, he found that he could not let go. Although he returned to drawing in the 1970s, he felt that photography was always his best means of expression.
With it he became one of the finest and most highly respected image makers of our time, the godfather of documentary photography and a guiding influence on generations of subsequent photographers, both professionals and amateurs.
To many Cartier-Bresson is known as the father of Magnum Photos, which he founded in 1947 with Robert Capa, William Vandivert, David Seymour and George Rodger. Magnum was set up as a co-operative agency that was, in spite of its internal squabbles, driven by a left-wing humanistic spirit which set the tone for the future of photojournalism. Today, membership of Magnum is one of the highest accolades a photographer could hope to receive.
Cartier-Bresson carried his style of hungry curiosity with him as he travelled around the world for Magnum, commissioned to record the seminal events of the second half of the 20th century. His photographs — including shots of Gandhi hours before his assassination, of Stalinist Russia, the Chinese civil war — form a patchwork of visual cuttings from the history of the social and political movements of the postwar world.
But Cartier-Bresson always stuck to the conviction that the great event was simply daily life, a view that is borne out by the fact that his best photographs were the ones that he took for himself, not on assignment.
Intent on recording the joys of the ephemeral, he prowled the streets and the plains with his Leica, a beautiful little 35mm camera that was so small it was scarcely noticeable and so fast that it could shoot in almost any available light. Cartier-Bresson quickly mastered his new tool and used it with magnificent effect to capture the unexpected detail, the decisive moment — not the epic but the lyric truth.
In 1960 his roving eye spotted a wonderful tableau in a Neapolitan museum. Two young men lean forward towards a kneeling statue of a naked Roman goddess who appears to be imparting some lubricious piece of gossip in a whisper. In the foreground, another standing goddess turns and cranes her head towards them in an attempt to pick up the details. In 1972, on a long trip to the USSR, he snapped a proud Armenian father standing on the shores of a vast lake. Balanced on the palm of his upstretched hand is his standing toddler, rounded out with layers of muffling clothes.
An exquisite delicacy hovers around the edges of these private pictures, in which he shows us that the slightest thing in the world is valuable and worth paying attention to: that a Mexican peasant’s smile is as precious as the rings on the fingers of a Las Vegas gambler, or a prisoner in Lahore deserves as much respect as an assembly of Spanish priests.
Cartier-Bresson was one of those rare photographers who possessed both a style and a vision. His style derived from his insatiable curiosity, and with his abundance of eagerness and his facility with the camera he found a consistent aesthetic view of the world. But his vision was more about his life, his heart and the distillation of the accidents of his birth time and place in the 20th century.
In 1940 he had been taken prisoner by the Germans, but escaped and joined the French Resistance. He was already sufficiently admired as a photographer for the Museum of Modern Art in New York to have proposed a posthumous retrospective of his work, believing that he had died during the war. In the event, he spent a year curating it himself in 1946. In 1952 his first book, Images à la Sauvette, was published with a cover by Matisse, a volume that is still described as the most enduring in photographic literature.
By now Cartier-Bresson’s name and work were well known in the photographic world, but he remained acutely camera shy. He preferred it that way, describing his work as “stalking”, for which celebrity would have been a distinct hindrance.
Cartier-Bresson’s photographs are revered by other photographers because they are beautiful. In 1952, walking along the Rue Mouffetard in Paris, he spotted a small boy walking jauntily along carrying two large bottles filled with red wine. Cartier-Bresson’s eye and his brain reacted instantaneously, and his arm lifted his Leica to his eye to snap the boy bursting with pleasure at the peak of his proud little grin. Another of my favourites is the strange surrealist trio photographed in Alicante in 1933, their hands raised and connected in some complicated choreographical performance, or perhaps just preparing to shave the back of the man’s head. An accompanying picture, of three plump women reposing in a kind of Turkish bath, is another masterpiece of visual wit. The one in the background leans forward, balancing on one leg and one arm, while the other two lounge like odalisques on the floor tiles, their considerable exposed bulk nonchalantly displayed to Cartier-Bresson’s camera. One’s first response is that Matisse lives in this picture, in the sensuous spread of flesh and in the busy patterns of the tiles. But more insistently, one wonders how the tall and spindly 25-year-old Frenchman talked his way into this den of femininity.
Cartier-Bresson possessed a rare and original quality of creative invention, but no less important was his sense of the sweetness of life, a free pleasure in the beauty of the world and the preciousness of sight.
Cartier-Bresson, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Aug 6-Oct 23 (www.natgalscot.ac.uk 0131-624 6200)
