decisive moment , the australian (05 nov2011)

7/28/2019 Decisive Moment , The Australian (05 Nov2011)

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review (mag)

Decisive momentby: Christopher Allen

From: The Australian

November 05, 2011 12:00AM

A man leaps a flooded area at Gare St Lazare, 1932. The photograph perfectly captures his reflection in the moment

before his foot lands in the water.

Source: Supplied

IN the 19th century, the invention of lithography led to the creation in England, then in France and elsewhere,

of new illustrated newspapers, which for the first time offered a mass audience pictures of the great events of

the day, portraits of prominent contemporaries and views of cities and lands they would never see for

themselves.

For the first time, the features of the great and the celebrated became ubiquitous. Fame, which etymologically implies

being spoken of, now meant being pictured.

Then photographic reproduction replaced lithography and, with its even more plausible promise of veracity, the

photographic image dominated the illustrated press of the 20th century. In the second half of the century, though, this

role was undermined by television, which offered moving pictures, every day, of events unfolding all across the world.

Today, the extension of the same logic through new media has led to online, round-the-clock news superseding the

nightly news bulletin. The latest development in this process is that amateurs with mobile phones and other devices

take footage of revolutions and wars and send them to broadcasters.

So today we have more images than ever -- in some cases these include pictures of things we would never have seenotherwise -- but, as with the proliferation of family photographs, you can end up with countless snaps but no striking

or memorable pictures. The role of the photojournalist, in trying to capture something unique and memorable, has

degenerated into that of the paparazzo, who confuses intrusion and indiscretion with investigation.

isive moment | The Australian http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/decisive-moment/story-fn9...

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One of the greatest figures from the golden age of photojournalism was Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose oeuvre is

commemorated in a beautiful exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery.

The selection from Cartier-Bresson's vast corpus was made by the photographer before he died and all the prints were

produced under his supervision for an exhibition first shown at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in 2003, before

travelling across the world.

Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) trained as a painter with Andre Lhote and later worked with celebrated filmmaker Jean

Renoir. He met many of the surrealists, was involved in left-wing politics and became friends with rich youngAmerican Harry Crosby and his wife Caresse, with whom he had an affair.

He established himself as an outstanding photojournalist between the wars and initially joined the French army at the

outbreak of World War II as an army photographer. When France capitulated, he was taken prisoner and sent to work

in German prison camps until he eventually escaped, joining the Resistance.

After the war he formed the Magnum photographic agency with Robert Capa and two other colleagues and spent

many years in India, where he was present at the time of Gandhi's assassination, in China, where he covered the last

months of the Kuomintang government and the first months of Mao's new communist state, as well as Japan and

Indonesia. He also worked in the US, Mexico and Russia, as well as France, England and Italy.

He largely stopped taking photographs in the 1970s and took up his interest in painting again but the exhibitionincludes a fine picture from 1999 in which the long shadows of early morning trees are matched by the shadow of a

human figure, the elderly artist's discreet self-portrait.

Cartier-Bresson is most famously associated with the idea of the decisive moment, which became the English title of

his first published collection in 1952.

The idea comes from Cardinal de Retz, a highly intelligent but scheming figure in French 17th-century politics who is

often slightly misquoted in texts on Cartier-Bresson. He wrote that "there is nothing in the world that does not have its

decisive moment" and that in life one needs to recognise that moment and seize it.

There are plenty of vivid examples of the principle in the exhibition, perhaps none better than the final picture -- the

last impression of the exhibition -- of a man trying to leap across a flooded area behind the Gare St Lazare in Paris in

1932.

For a moment his black silhouette, echoed by a dance poster in the background, is suspended above the glassy surface

of the water, which produces an almost perfect inverted mirror image. A split-second later his heel will touch the still

water and the illusion, the image, the photograph will all be gone.

A less dramatic example is the pair of plump working-class couples having a picnic, which suddenly became a picture

when the man on the left picked up the bottle to fill his glass, simultaneously animating the composition and joining

its left and right-hand sides.

But as you look more closely, you realise that the decisive moment is also the decisive place: the first picture on theleft as we enter is of a man walking down a street in Spain, and what makes the composition is that he is captured just

as he is in the middle of a circular pattern painted on the hoarding behind him.

Almost opposite is another exquisitely precise picture, of a gentleman in a bowler hat standing in the middle of a

footpath bordered by bare, wintry, pollarded trees, his dark figure silhouetted against the reflective surface of the wet

pavement.

Pictures such as this remind you that photography is, as its etymology suggests, drawing with light.

But although this may be true of all photography in principle, and most conspicuously of black-and-white

photography, it is strikingly appropriate to some artists in particular, including Cartier-Bresson, each of whose pictures

is conceived as a kind of story about light and dark.

Almost at random one could cite the picture of Salerno, where the mass of darkness in the foreground dramatises the

figure of the boy and the cart in the background; or the composition in Tarascon, in the south of France, where a man

hurries through a shaft of light that cuts across the shadowed streetscape. Even when light is not employed in so


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overtly expressive a manner, Cartier-Bresson's ability to translate what he sees into tonal terms is what underpins the

compositional structure of pictures such as that of an old Chinese priest, a dark figure against the grey uniforms of the

communist soldiers behind him.

The composition seems so natural, almost inevitable, that it probably doesn't occur to viewers what a particular skill is

required: where the layman sees a cacophony of colours, Cartier-Bresson sees a range of tonal values -- one might say

he had internalised the eye of the camera, except that in fact painters, too, learn to see through the flesh of colour to

the tonal skeleton.

Cartier-Bresson's subject is humanity in the endless diversity he discovers across the world. He has an acute eye for

incongruities and ironies but it is invariably a sympathetic rather than a satirical one.

He sees aspects of America that are absurd or pathetic but he does not obtrude moral judgments; similarly he captures

images of Soviet kitsch, like the bedraggled crowd standing in front of a ludicrous mass of life-sized socialist realist

sculptures, or the father and son walking across a square, echoing the colossal striding figure of Lenin behind them;

this latter image in particular conveys the gentleness of an irony that is always mitigated by compassion.

Among the most striking pictures are those of people in very poor countries, eking out a subsistence living in harsh

countryside or even harsher city streets.

The picture of a young Iranian woman standing on what I take to be a threshing machine, driven by an ox, gives anidea of how immediate the question of survival can be: she doesn't go to a supermarket to buy bread, she threshes the

grain from her land, then presumably mills it and bakes it into loaves. And the bare, austere hills remind us of the

constant struggle this represents.

One feels that Cartier-Bresson was driven to seek out places where life is experienced in a more elemental way than in

the sophisticated Parisian world of his youth; and as much as the material conditions of life, it is the psychological or

mental life of the people that he glimpses, whether subjects are caught unawares or stare straight at the photographer.

We are confronted not only by the enigma of other minds but the double enigma of minds that are profoundly different

from our own: what goes on in the head of an utterly uneducated and especially an illiterate person?

We cannot assume any capacity for abstract ideas or logical reasoning because these things come only with literacy

and systematic intellectual training.

On the other hand we recognise the whole range of human feelings: happiness, sadness, kindness and brutality. And

we can see why people such as this are drawn to systems that offer ready-made answers to the questions they ask

themselves: various religions and, more recently, totalitarian politics.

In contrast, a wall is devoted to pictures of intellectuals and artists, all educated and in some cases extraordinarily

brilliant men and women with complex intellectual lives.

Here the decisive moment is a matter of choosing which attitude or passing gesture captures something quintessential:

like Francis Bacon with the twist in his posture and his hand to his head, or Francois Mauriac leaning back in hisstudy, or Samuel Beckett seeming to hesitate between coming and going. Nearby are several pictures of Alberto

Giacometti, including a memorable one in which Cartier-Bresson has caught him as he strides past and inadvertently

mimics his own sculpture The Walking Man.

Mortality is pervasive and casts a certain melancholy over the images of slum-dwellers and men of letters alike. Life

and hope, on the other hand, are repeatedly evoked through images of children.

There is a beautiful picture of a family living on a barge at Bougival, where the young father stands in the foreground,

seen from the back. It is the reactions of his family that are really the subject of the picture, his wife and his baby

reaching up to him; even the little dog is looking up to him as though in admiration (one of several images in which

animals provide cues to our response; another is the stretching fox terrier behind the portrait of William Faulkner).

Among the most touching images are two representing poor children playing joyously in the wreckage of a house;

another shows three little girls walking past massive ruined buildings in Liverpool long after the end of World War II.

And one of Cartier-Bresson's most memorable pictures is one of two little boys inspecting a pair of ancient statues in


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the museum at Naples, which simultaneously speaks of spontaneous curiosity, the beginning of the life of the mind

and of the vocation of art to make things that will outlast individual mortality.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, until November 27

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decisive moment , the australian (05 nov2011)

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