Decisive moment | The Australian

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review (mag)

Decisive moment
by: 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 seen otherwise -- 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.

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Decisive moment | The Australian

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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 young American 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 exhibition includes 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 the left 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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Decisive moment | The Australian

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/decisive-moment/story-fn9...

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 an idea 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 his study, 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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Decisive moment | The Australian

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/decisive-moment/story-fn9...

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 Previous set Next set

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