A show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art explores the many facets of photography’s most protean talent
Valencia, Spain, 1933
Consisting of close to 300 photographs, the Museum of Modern Art's exhibit, "Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century," covers almost every aspect of the great photographer's long career, beginning in the 1930s, when he abandoned an aspiration to paint and picked up a camera instead. During this time, he flirted with the ideals of the surrealist movement and it was his great insight that the Leica — a hand-held camera with a blink-of-an-eye shutter — was an ideal instrument with which to capture, in an instant, the kinds of imagery that the surrealists strove for, moments that went straight to the heart of the uncanny, much in the manner of this image, taken at a bullring in Spain.(c) 2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
Coney Island, New York, 1946
Though he is always considered a pioneering photojournalist, Cartier-Bresson's greatest gift was probably for pictures that didn't "report" anything more newsworthy than, say, this erotic storm system of bodies, glimpsed on a New York beach in 1946.(c) 2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
Sumatra, Indonesia, 1952
In the catalogue to the show, Peter Galassi, MoMA's chief curator of photography and the organizer of the exhibit, reproduces this image alongside the two on the roll that precede it and follow it. What emerges is a small exegesis of how the photographer worked. Having found his ideal arrangement of rice paddies and reflections, Cartier-Bresson "waited until a turbaned woman appeared on the embankment pathway, perfectly positioned to anchor the image."(c) 2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
San Fermines, Pamplona, Spain, 1952
Galassi also provides the full contact sheet of the roll from which this photo is drawn, along with an analysis of how the photographer's attention was drawn away from the action in the bull ring and settled on the crowd and the toreadors beneath them. Galassi observes, frame by frame, how the photographer shifts his camera until he gets just the right balance of compositional elements, then waits for the definitive emotional moment. Once he had it (and there is only one frame) he returned his eye to the bulls in the ring.(c) 2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
World’s Fair, Brussels, 1958
Until he hung up his cameras in the 1970s, Cartier-Bresson continued to take straightforward documentary assignments, but his work maintained a whiff of the surrealism that had originally inspired him.(c) 2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
Greenfield, Indiana, 1960
Two women exit a polling station during the 1960 U.S. presidential elections. The exhibit will remain at MoMA until June 28, after which it will travel to Chicago, San Francisco and Atlanta.(c) 2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
New York, 1959
Contestants participate in a taping of the television show, To Tell the Truth. One of the breathtaking qualities of the exhibit is the way that the photographs retain an immediacy and modernity, while depicting places and events from long ago. In his introduction to the catalogue, Galassi writes that the "panoramic scope" of Cartier-Bresson's work, "its lusty curiosity, its acute responsiveness to the full panoply of human experience — and its many masterpieces of photographic art — constitute a uniquely full and nourishing account of the emergence of the modern world."(c) 2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
Santa Clara, Mexico, 1934-35
The show makes clear that in his early career work, Cartier-Bresson showed that many of the obsessions of Surrealist fantasy — the shocking juxtapositions, erotic concealments, dismembered anatomies — could be found in the ordinary life of the streets.(c) 2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
Madrid, 1933
The Leica that Cartier-Bresson carried held only 36 exposures at a time — with no motor drive, of course — but his efficiency and economy were extraordinary. He walked the streets with an almost Zen-like patience, hunting for the kinds of precise shutter moments that now epitomize great photojournalism.(c) 2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
Hyères, France, 1932
One of the first monographs that Cartier-Bresson published was entitled Images á la sauvette, released in France with a cover by Henri Matisse. In the United States, the book was published by Simon and Schuster, with the title The Decisive Moment, a phrase that has come to define the approach to photography that he perfected.(c) 2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
Juvisny, France, 1938
In 1937, Cartier-Bresson took his first (and last) salaried job, with the leftwing Paris daily, Ce Soir. During this period, he took an assignment to illustrate a campaign to win more vacation time for workers. The shoot included this frame, now considered one of the his classic images, though the editors who assigned him, apparently did not see it that way. Their spreads on the story did not include it.(c) 2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
Irene and Frédéric Joliot-Curie, 1944
The MoMA exhibit also includes many of the portraits the photographer made of the leading lights of the twentieth century: In addition to the Joliot-Curies, who were awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1935, he shot Henri Matisse, Truman Capote, Albert Camus, and Carl Jung, to name a few.(c) 2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
New York, 1947
Cartier-Bresson came to America many times during his career. On one early visit, he captured this extraordinary moment, as a mother and son, separated by the war, are reunited in New York. One of the things that make this so moment so extraordinary is the way the other people in the frame — and there are many of them — remain absorbed in their own concerns, oblivious to the drama of the reunited family.(c) 2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
Nehru Announces Gandhi’s Death, Birla House, Delhi, India, January 30, 1948
After the war (during which he languished for three years in a German labor camp before escaping) Cartier-Bresson began to travel the globe, documenting events in Asia, Africa and North America. He was present for some of the most significant events of the post-war era and displayed an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time. In January 1948, he photographed Mahatma Gandhi right before the Indian leader was assassinated, then covered the funeral that followed.(c) 2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
Shanghai, December 1948
As his career as a photojournalist evolved, Cartier-Bresson took assignments from the top magazines of the day, like Life and Paris-Match, publications that built their reputations on the kind of photojournalism that Cartier-Bresson was practicing. Together with two legendary war photographers, Robert Capa and David "Chim" Seymour, he founded the photo agency Magnum, which would set the gold standard of photojournalism for many decades to come. After World War II, he found himself in China, where he documented the collapse of post-war Chinese society. The Shanghai residents in this photo are trying to get gold from a bank in the days before Communist forces arrived in the city.(c) 2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
