Content area
Henri Cartier-Bresson ranks as one of the 20th century's best known and most influential photographers. Cookman considers Cartier-Bresson's claim to surrealism and his rejection of photojournalism.
Full text
Henri Cartier-Bresson's contribution to modern photography, and by extension to twentieth-century vision, is without dispute. Among twentieth-century photographers, he ranks as one of the best known and most influential. Appreciated by lay audiences for his portrayal of the human condition, by the art world for his consummate formalism, by historians for his advancement of the photographic medium, and by photographers for his incomparable personal style, he is a giant in modern photography.
In the early 1930s when purist photography had gained ascendancy over the previously dominant international movement of Pictorialism, CartierBresson created a new aesthetic which would eclipse both styles. Encapsulated in the term "the decisive moment," it comprised two elements: First, the photograph must contain significant content. Most often, in his pictures, it has been the human condition. Second, this content must be arranged in a rigorous composition. Form, line, texture, tonality, contrast, and geometric proportions carry an importance equal to, but also inextricable from, the content. For Cartier-Bresson, decisive-moment photography is "the simultaneous recognition in a fraction of a second of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms."1
During the 1930s, Cartier-Bresson created this mode of photographic expression and elevated it to a level unmatched by countless would-be imitators. Several factors contributed to his achievement. Among them were his discovery of the Leica,2 which he called "the extension of my eye"; his artistic education with the Cubist painter Andro Lhote; his zest for life, travel, and rebellion, sparked by his association with Andre Breton's Surrealist movement and his avid reading of James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Arthur Rimbaud, Romain Rolland, and others; and his acute physical reflexes. Drawing on these and other resources, he demonstrated to the world the potential of the 35mm camera to make pictures remarkable for their revelatory content and formal excellence. From the early 1930s to the mid 1970s, when he stopped actively photographing, he made hundreds of images so palpable that they pull the viewer into their space; images so visually rich that the viewer can look at them again and again, finding fresh rewards each time; images that critics have called magical, evocative, marvelous. In so doing, he earned a prominent place in the history of photography.
He produced the great majority of these images while engaged in magazine and book photojournalism. By his own account he felt compelled to witness the events and people of his world and to communicate what he witnessed to the mass audiences of illustrated magazines. His credits include such news situations as the liberation of Paris, the funeral of Mohandas Gandhi, the fall of Beijing to Mao Tse-tung's forces, and the May 1968 rebellion by French students and workers. He explored numerous countries and cultures including China, Cuba, Germany, Great Britain, India, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United States.3 In 1954, during the thaw that followed the death of Josef Stalin, he became the first western photojournalist allowed to work in the Soviet Union in seven years. The resulting reportage was published in more than a dozen magazines and earned Cartier-Bresson his second of three Overseas Press Club Awards for best still photographs from abroad.
His portraiture alone would constitute a distinguished career. He photographed for publication many of the notable figures of this century.4 Many of his portraits have become the iconic images of their subjects. From 1933 to 1974, Cartier-Bresson's credit line appeared on more than 475 picture stories or single photographs in Der Stern, Du, Epoca, Harper's Bazaar, Holiday, Life, Look, Paris Match, Picture Post, Regards, Vogue, Vu, and other illustrated magazines and newspapers.5
Now, almost twenty-five years after he stopped actively photographing, CartierBresson's career as a photojournalist is in danger of being minimized or denied by writers in the art world who want to position his work as art instead of photojournalism. Through argument, implication, and exclusion of evidence, they have concluded that he intended to create art, not tell photographic stories. In August 1995, for example, Michael Kimmelman, art critic for the New York Tunes, wrote a fifty-inch article about Cartier-Bresson without any reference to his photojournalism. Kimmelman began by pro-claiming him "France's pre-eminent artist," but he made no mention of his reportage.6
Because magazines are ephemeral, the original presentation of Cartier-Bresson's picture stories is largely forgotten. Because he has extracted individual photographs from his sequential reportages and represented them in books and museum exhibitions, he is now known as a single-image photographer. Further, most of his books decontextualize his photographs, identifying them with only a place, name, and date. Typically, the captions are separated from the pictures and placed at the end of the books. This rejection of traditional journalistic captions has the effect of presenting the photographs as generalized statements about the human condition instead of particular instances grounded in historical circumstances. All these factors contribute to the assessment of Cartier-Bresson as solely an artist.
Cartier-Bresson did make photographic art. His pictures sprang from a finely developed visual sensibility, and they have the power to evoke an aesthetic response in viewers. What is in danger of being minimized or denied is that he made this art while producing magazine and book photojournalism. The art world notwithstanding, the two modes of photography are not mutually exclusive.
This article intends to reclaim Cartier-Bresson as a magazine and book photojournalist. After a more extensive review of the art world's position, especially the argument that he was a surrealist, and after a consideration of Cartier- Bresson's own claim to surrealism and rejection of photojournalism and photography, it will argue that his style was, in fact, realism and his approach was, on occasion, social realism. That is, that he used his camera to expose the contradictions of class and race with the hope that the resulting photographs might improve social conditions. Cartier-Bresson's own writings and statements from the 1950s and 1960s, and his little-known involvement in European politics of the extreme left establish his realism and his social concern. Two photographs made during the Depression and a largely forgotten 1961 picture story on the American civil rights movement offer visual examples of this thesis.
This position is based on sources never before available for publication. With great generosity, Cartier-Bresson gave the author access to his contact sheets, caption materials, correspondence and other primary resources at the Paris bureau of Magnum Photos, his agency. Those materials have been synthesized with his writings and statements, with his reportages as published in magazines and books, and with numerous conversations with him.
The attempt to claim Cartier-Bresson for art at the expense of photojournalism dates back fifty years to an essay by Lincoln Kirstein that accompanied the photographer's one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1947. Kirstein was the first of many writers to use Cartier-Bresson's coverage of the coronation of King George VI in 1937 to minimize his photojournalism. Because he photographed the crowd instead of the new British sovereign and the pageantry of the event, so the argument goes, he was not a typical photojournalist.7
The need for art critics to deny Cartier-Bresson's photojournalism is grounded in modernism's fierce allegiance to purity. True art can have no other motivation, function, or concern except itself. The worst impurity is commercial taint. Romanticized as one of the last heroes in our society, the artist is presumed to be independent, even intractable, choosing starvation above compromise or commerce. For the modernist, art springing from commercial roots is an impossibility. Ingrid Sischy, the arts editor and writer, has made clear the lowly status of photojournalism in the hierarchy of modernist values:
That limiting, fragmenting system which divides people who use the medium into categories-fine-art photographers or commercial photographers or news photographers-may have had many exceptions and challenges over the years, but it is still firmly in place. No matter that, for instance, a photographer's imagery is highly inventive, and stands on its own: if it was originally produced on assignment, he or she is still pigeonholed as "less" than an artist, and has a harder time being taken seriously than someone whose pictures are first seen in an art gallery.8
Thus, the art critic James Thrall Soby marveled that Cartier-Bresson could rise above the stultifying effects that journalistic assignments presumably inflicted. "In each case he has achieved images which far transcend the usual photographic reporting, though many of these images were created on assignment," Soby wrote. "Seemingly Cartier-Bresson's poetic imagination, far from being stultified by specific commissions from the publishers of newspapers and magazines, is never hired out to anyone but himself."9 This line of interpretation reached its apex with John Szarkowski, former director of the photography department of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. In a wall label for his 1968 exhibition Cartier-Bresson: Recent Photographs, Szarkowski tried to explain away Cartier-Bresson's photojournalism:
Notwithstanding his spirited and sophisticated advocacy of the photojournalist's role, however, the pictures shown here would suggest that journalism has been the occasion, not the motive force, of his own best work. Journalism concerns itself primarily with the world of hierarchical events, while Cartier-Bresson concerns himself first of all with the quality of ordinary life. Few of his pictures are tied to newsworthy episodes; although made in the hundredth part of a second, they speak of the character of decades and generations. ... CartierBresson is not a photo-journalist, he is a photo philosopher.10
In 1987, Peter Galassi, then Szarkowski's assistant and now his successor at MoMA, continued to advance this perspective by interpreting CartierBresson's work of the early 1930s as surrealist. In the catalog essay for his exhibition Henri Carter-Bresson: The Early Work, Galassi based his argument on Cartier-Bresson's involvement with Breton's circle and on the surrealist strategies of ddpaysement and juxtaposition which he found in his early photographs. Depaysement, which literally means to be removed from one's native country, can best be understood as disorientation. The ordinary, wrenched from its familiar context, triggers extraordinary associations. Juxtaposition of unrelated elements also provokes psychic reveries. Galassi proposed that this surrealism should be read forward throughout his career: "[I]f seen from the viewpoint of the early work-if interpreted as an artful invention-the later work is enriched."11 He also minimized Cartier-Bresson's photojournalism, relegating to a footnote the acknowledgment that he produced reportages for the French magazine Vu in 1933, and the American magazine New Theatre in 1935. "Despite these isolated exceptions, it is clear that in the thirties Cartier-Bresson worked almost exclusively for himself," Galassi wrote.12
To understand this positioning of [Cartier-Bresson as a surrealist, a common misunderstanding must be clarified. In America, surrealism has been equated primarily with the paintings of Salvador Dali. Largely because of their content, the adjective "surreal" has been debased to a synonym for weird. Few Americans understand surrealism as an artistic and literary strategy to liberate the human psyche and as a political movement which aimed to overthrow the European political and economic order during the period between the two world wars. Surrealism sprang from twin roots in dadaist anarchy and Freudian theories of human consciousness. It soon tapped into a third source, Communism. Many surrealists had been dadaists during World War I, and they continued to subscribe to that movement's tactic of using art to attack capitalism's social, economic, and political structure.
In the early 1920s, the surrealists abandoned dadaism's nihilism. Adapting Sigmund Freud's theories, they sought to unite the conscious and unconscious levels of the mind. Breton, the group's leader and chief theorist, proclaimed its credo: "I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak."'3 He grounded surrealism in the Freudian concepts of free association and the importance of dreams: "Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought." Surrealism functioned, he explained, "in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern."14
Breton called this lack of rational control "psychic automatism." One example was automatic writing, in which surrealists wrote so fast that their logical faculties could no longer control the flow of words, presumably forcing their subconscious to take over. The resulting words produced associations that triggered the surreal experience. The 35mm camera offered the potential for pure psychic automatism for the photographer. Because it was light and flexible, the photographer could react intuitively to a fluid situation, clicking the shutter faster than his consciousness could control. Because most viewers assumed that photographs were literal transcriptions of reality, the pictorial ambiguities that resulted were especially potent in prompting a surreal reverie for them as well. These are the fundamental dimensions of the argument to position Cartier-Bresson as a surrealist and, by implication, exclusively as an artist.
On first reading, Cartier-Bresson's own claims to be a surrealist and his rejection of photojournalism would appear to support this position. In a letter to Szarkowski, responding to his 1968 wall note, he said photojournalism was essentially a diversionary tactic that allowed him to pursue his surrealism undisturbed. Referring to his friend and colleague Robert Capa he wrote:
May I give you the reason for that label "photojournalism" and tell you whc suggested it. It was Robert Capa ... [who] warned me: "if the label 'Surrealism' is attached to you" (because after all, it is 'surrealism', as a conception of life, which is maybe the strongest influence on me-though not especially surrealist painting) "you will have an exhibition once in a while and your work will become precious and confidential. Keep on doing what you want, but use the name 'photojournalism', which will put you in direct contact with what is going on in the world." So let it be. Henri.15
A complete reading of his statements on surrealism indicates, however, that his use of the term has nothing to do with the aesthetics of his photography. He has never located his surrealism in his images, and he disdains surrealism as an aesthetic style. He calls surrealist paintings "literary," which for him is a term of scorn when applied to a visual art. Instead, he situated his surrealism in his imagination and his rebellious approach to life. In a 1975 article he distinguished aesthetic from imagination: "I was influenced by surrealism," he wrote. "And surrealism, it's not making strange pictures; it's the power of imagination. It is a power and a respect of imagination."16
In a 1986 conversation with Gilles Mora, editor of a French journal on photography, he defined his surrealism as approaching life with an attitude of revolt. "I was marked, not by surrealist painting, but by the conceptions of Breton, at a very young age, around 1926-1927.... The conception of Surrealism by Breton appealed to me greatly, the role of spontaneous expression, of intuition and especially the attitude of revolt." This was a revolt "[i]n art, but also in life."he added."
Cartier-Bresson's own statements refute the implication that he intended to practice surrealist art. His surrealism was an attitude of rebellion that is compatible with the tradition of photojournalism that seeks to effect social change. While surrealist interpretations can be constructed for several of his images, it must be noted that his spontaneous photographs bear no resemblance to the inventions of such contemporary photographic surrealists as Man Ray, Hans Bellmer, and Maurice Tabard.
The attempts by the art world to minimize Cartier-Bresson's photojournalism coincide with his own rejection of photography and photojournalism. In a 1974 interview he called himself "a very bad reporter and a photojournalist."ls In another interview that year, published in the Parisian daily newspaper Le Monde, he disavowed photography. "Photography no longer interests me,"19 he declared. In a conversation in April 1990, he insisted vehemently that he had never been a photojournalist and had never produced reportages. "They want to put clothes on me that don't fit me," he said.
Notwithstanding the voluminous publication of his photographs, Cartier-Bresson insists he was engaged in a private pursuit that had nothing to do with journalism except on the most superficial level. In different contexts he describes his activity as experiencing the world, keeping a visual diary, using a mechanical sketch book, and engaging in Zen encounters that united him with his subjects. He calls his camera "a tool for instant drawing." Central to all these metaphors is his insistence that the fused act of seeing, composing, and clicking the shutter is paramount, while the photograph that results is an uninteresting by-product. "I adore taking a photo," he said. "Once it is taken, for me, the pleasure is finished, terminated."' On another occasion, he expressed the same idea with the metaphor of a hunter who kills game but is not interested in eating it.
Cartier-Bresson's denial of photojournalism is part of a larger rejection of photography. He has stated repeatedly that when he began photographing in the 1930s, he did not know any photographers and had no interest in the history of photography. "I had no curiosity for photography in general,' he wrote. "Yes I was snapping pictures, but my friends Nicolas Nabokov, [and Alberto] Giacometti, to mention only some with a well-known name, had nothing to do with photography. My life was mostly, very much mostly elsewhere. My intimate friends had nothing to do with photography. "21
In fact, in the early and mid 1930s he did associate with photographers such as Capa, David Seymour (Chim), Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and Walker Evans. He acknowledges this, but insists, they never discussed photography. "In those days it would have sounded pompous, silly, and pretentiously stupid to discuss photographs."22 He says he found the camera "a marvelous tool" and the act of photographing a compelling way to experience the world, but for photography itself he felt nothing. "I respect my camera-[the] hell with photography per se since those days and still now."23
He also acknowledges his ties with the picture magazines. "I am extremely grateful to Life, Harper's Bazaar, Holiday, etc., who set me free and paid for my upkeep and generous salary," he wrote.24 And again: "[I was] not ashamed to deal with magazines to communicate with the average person." For the most part, however, he insists that it was simply not important that he photographed on assignment; reported on events, situations, countries, and individuals; selected, sequenced, and captioned his pictures for editors; and encouraged his agents to market his work to mass-circulation magazines to the maximum extent possible. He made his living at it, he admits, but his real interests were always "poetry, novels, drawing, painting, ... music, and friends."25
The causes of Cartier-Bresson's rejection of photojournalism are complex and may never be fully understood. Some were no doubt personal. In 1974 when he made his rejection of photography public in an interview with Le Monde, he was 66 years old. He and his second wife had a two-year-old daughter. The life of a world-traveling photojournalist no doubt seemed less attractive. His friend and early publisher Teriade had warned him he was starting to repeat himself in photography and advised him to return to art.26 Cartier-Bresson followed the advice. While he still takes an occasional photograph, he has devoted himself almost exclusively to drawing and painting since the mid 1970s.
In the Le Monde interview, Cartier-Bresson suggested one possible reason for his rejection of photography: "And the mess the world's in at the moment results in such a flood of photographs," he commented.27 Part of that "mess" was cold war politics including the threat of a nuclear holocaust, but he also deplored the socio-economic state, especially the encroachment of consumerism into reportage. "The changes in the world which began around 1950 have affected our profession with the unbalanced situation between reporting, entertainment and merchandising in the magazines."I Although not widely known, he had resigned as a member of Magnum Photos several years earlier in protest against the level of commercial work practiced by the agency's younger members. When his objections to this "commercial exploitation of a label" failed to reform his colleagues, he resigned on principle. Effective September 1, 1966, he was no longer a shareholder in Magnum, although the agency continued to maintain his archives and sell his work to journalistic clients.29
Cartier-Bresson's attempt to reinterpret his oeuvre contrasts sharply with the commitment to photojournalism and realism that he expressed during the 1950s and 1960s. His first published statement about his work was the preface to The Decisive Moment, a collection of his photographs published in 1952. In it he synthesized his understanding of photographic reportage with an account of the magazine world. The text corroborates that he thought of his work as journalism, but, more important, it delineates the intellectual framework within which he produced his reportages.
That Cartier-Bresson wrote as a journalist cannot be disputed. The entire preface adopts the point of view of a magazine photojournalist explaining his work and world to a lay audience. His conception of that world includes the ethics and working methods of magazine photojournalists; their product, the picture story; the editors and designers who shape that product; and the audience who consumes it. In several instances, he spoke of himself as a "photo-reporter" and of his work as photographic reportage. He described himself not as an artist, but as an "artisan" who delivered raw materials to his assigning editors. He said that he did not understand reportage when he began photographing, but over the years by learning from colleagues and by studying the picture magazines he "eventually learned-bit by bit-how to make a reportage with a camera, how to make a picture-story."30 Significant to the issue of his intentions is the fact that Cartier Bresson was not interested in an artistic self-expression that turned inward, but in communicating with a mass audience. "We photo-reporters are people who supply information to a world in a hurry," he wrote, "a world weighted down with preoccupations, prone to cacophony, and full of beings with a hunger for information, and needing the companionship of images."
In a statement published in the late 1960s, he delineated the twin poles of his photojournalism: witnessing his world and communicating what he witnessed to a mass audience.
The important thing about our relations with the press is that it provides us with the possibility of being in close contact with life's events. What is most satisfying for a photographer is not recognition, success and so forth. It's communication: what you say can mean something to other people, can be of a certain importance.31
Because Cartier-Bresson claims to be a surrealist in attitude, it is important to note that he photographed in a realist style. He has made numerous statements which establish his commitment to realism. In The Decisive Moment, he insisted on fidelity to reality. "Our task is to perceive reality, almost simultaneously recording it in the sketchbook which is our camera," he wrote. And again: "We must neither try to manipulate reality while we are shooting, nor must we manipulate the results in a darkroom." Although he rejected raw facts as uninteresting, he did find them useful for the higher purpose of communicating reality: "Through facts, however, we can reach an understanding of the laws that govern them, and be better able to select the essential ones which communicate reality." He decried portraits that flatter their subjects, because "the result is no longer real." He described the act of photographing as extracting the subject from the undifferentiated chaos of reality. "Photography implies the recognition of a rhythm in the world of real things. What the eye does is to find and focus on the particular subject within the mass of reality. "32
Perhaps more than any other statement, his comment in a 1954 interview expressed the faith of the realist that working from nature is superior to inventing: "Reality is sufficiently rich, it is much more than we are able to imagine.""' This belief is the foundation of his repeated insistence that he "takes" instead of "makes" his photographs.
Cartier-Bresson's theory and practice of photographic realism did not appear in a vacuum. His friends and early colleagues, Capa and Chim, came out of the Berlin tradition of magazine photojournalism.' The magazine editor Stefan Lorant, a major force in establishing this tradition, articulated principles of realism remarkably similar to those of Cartier-Bresson. Lorant wrote:
That the photograph should not be posed; that the camera should be like a notebook of the trained reporter, which records contemporary events as they happen without trying to stop them to make a picture; that people should be photographed as they really are and not as they would like to appear; that photo-reportage should concern itself with men and women of every kind and not simply with a small social clique; that everyday life should be portrayed in a realistic unselfconscious way.35
With Cartier-Bresson's realism established, it must be added that on occasion he worked as a social realist, using his camera to expose social and economic problems. In France, the tradition of social realism began in the 1840s with the painter Gustave Courbet. He and the social realists in art and literature who followed him, inverted the scale of classical values espoused by the French Academy. They substituted ugliness for beauty, poverty for wealth, prostitutes for princesses, and proletarians for monarchs, nobles, and heroes.
This last sentence could stand as an inventory of Cartier-Bresson's subjects in the 1930s. He began photographing at a time when the horrors of World War I had put an end to the idealized style of Pictorialism. As Alain Sayag, curator of photography at the Pompidou Center in Paris, wrote: "The dusky tones and pictorialist half-light, that `stifling atmosphere' of the turn-of-the-century, would brutally be cast away by images that removed the `make-up from reality' and exposed the cruel truth of man's relations with the world."36
There is a brutal quality to some of Cartier-Bresson's early pictures, but it was not a brutality that he condoned. Rather, he sought to expose the depredations of capitalist society during the Great Depression. His photographs were full of homeless, destitute men, ragamuffin children, gypsies, prostitutes, striking workers, and others outside the margins of respectable society. In contrast to the precious, idealized iconography of much Pictorialist subject matter, his photographs strip bare the raw harshness of life. The warm security in which three girls play in Clarence H. White's The Ring Toss, contrasts with Cartier-Bresson's picture of boys, one of them on crutches, playing among the ruins of Seville, Spain. The nudes of White, Anne W. Brigman, and E. J. Constant Puyo eliminate all imperfections through soft lighting, soft focus, and darkroom manipulation. These idealized bodies contrast with the sagging flesh of the prostitutes whom Cartier-Bresson photographed in Alicante, Spain, and with the brazen nakedness of the shaved pudendum of his traveling companion Leonor Fini.
One of Cartier-Bresson's strongest social statements was taken in 1932 in Aubervillers, in the "Red ring" of proletarian suburbs around Paris. (Figure 1) A boy, perhaps eight or nine years old, leans against the wall of a building covered with rusting corrugated siding. An unpainted wood building and a littered dirt street establish the confines of the pictorial space and the horizons of the boy's world. Everything he wears, from his cap to his overcoat to his boots, is oversized, tattered, handed down for the second or third time. In place of buttons a single safety pin holds his coat together. The photograph is straightforward, devoid of any dramatic devices or photographic gimmicks. Every inch is imbedded with grinding poverty. Fatigued, weighted down beneath the clothes and the worries of an adult world, the boy leans for support against the wall. His head tilts downward. His facial muscles are slack. His eyes focus on nothing in particular. Only his left arm, cocked akimbo on his hip, shows any resistance to the terrible gravity of poverty. Cartier-Bresson has not sentimentalized his subject. He has provided no stylistic or narrative clues to the picture's meaning. The child simply exists, and the viewer must construct his own response to the picture and to the society that produced its contents.37
Two comments by Cartier-Bresson support a social realist interpretation of this and other photographs of the period. In 1974, he suggested that as a young man he possessed the social conscience and zeal of a crusader. Referring to the late 1920s, he said, "Painting and changing the world counted more than anything else in my life."38 He explained his decision to move from painting to photography by saying, "The adventurer in me felt obliged to testify with a quicker instrument than a brush to the scars of the world."39 His recognition of the scars of the world-social injustice-and his desire to change the world-redress that injustice-establish that he did photograph with a social conscience. His attempts to expose social injustice with his camera were consistent with his revolt against the capitalist class, the perceived cause of that injustice.
Cartier-Bresson's social realism was grounded in his life experiences. The oldest son of a wealthy textile-manufacturing family, he rejected his father's haute bourgeoisie values and refused to enter his business. Since his teenage years, European politics exerted a profound influence on him. During the 1930s, he aligned himself with two major political currents. The first was a broad opposition to the capitalist class, which many intellectuals blamed for World War I and the ravages of the Great Depression. The second was the rise of the left in opposition to the Fascism of Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini.
Although there is no documentary evidence that Cartier-Bresson joined the Communist Party, his sympathy was certainly with the proletariat. Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues, his friend since childhood. dated their interest in Communism to the late 1920s. "[W]e discovered at the same time, together or separately, most of the things which were going to become essential a little later, the philosophy of Hegel, Marx and Communism," Mandiargues wrote.40 During the early 1930s, a friend of Capa's said, "Cartier-Bresson would not answer the telephone in the morning until he had read L'Humanite (the French Communist newspaper) and mastered the official line for the day. "41
Cartier-Bresson spent part of 1935 in New York City, where he lived with Nicholas Nabokov, a Russian 6migr6 composer. Nabokov recalled how much hope Cartier-Bresson placed in Communism: "We had long talks mostly on morals and politics," he wrote. "I suppose that both of us were radicals. But to Cartier-Bresson, the Communist movement was the bearer of history, of mankind's future-especially in those years, when Hitler had saddled Germany and when a civil war was about to explode in Spain. "42
Following his stay in New York, Cartier-Bresson returned to Paris, where his friends Capa and Chim were photographing for two Communist publications, the daily newspaper Ce Soir and the weekly picture magazine Regards. He soon joined them, producing several reportages for the magazine and one for the newspaper.
One of Cartier-Bresson's most famous photographs from this period is Sunday Afternoon on the Banks of the Marne (Figure 2). Although its historical meaning is not acknowledged in any of his books, the picture is rooted in the political struggles of the French left. Typically, it is interpreted as showing the decisive-moment aesthetic in conjunction with a subject exemplifying the human condition. Four people, masterfully arranged on a river bank, enjoy the pleasures of good food and companionship. Unaware of the photographer, they are fixed on film at the instant the man in the left foreground replenishes his glass of wine. "There is no more powerful image of contentment in the history of photography," one writer has declared." Another has seen the picture as a photographic homage to Edouard Manet's painting Le dejeuener sur l'herbe.4
In fact, the photograph shows the results of the first legislative victory of the Popular Front, a coalition of socialist, communist and radical parties that won a parliamentary majority in the French elections of April-May 1936. Cartier-Bresson helped achieve this victory by serving as an assistant director to Jean Renoir on La vie est a nous (Life belongs to us), a propaganda film commissioned by the French Communist Party. Immediately after the elections, French workers went on strike, occupying factories across the country. Leon Blum, the new Socialist prime minister, negotiated with representatives of French industry to end the occupation. Blum persuaded the industrialists to agree to collective bargaining, a twelve-percent wage increase, a forty-hour work week, and-for the first time in French history-paid vacations for workers. After Blum's coalition legislated the agreements, Cartier-Bresson took numerous photographs of workers enjoying their first paid vacations, including Banks of the Marne. Although this photograph apparently was not published at the time, he took many other pictures of les conges payes that appeared in two reportages in Regards.46
Cartier-Bresson saw his political choices during the 1930s as inevitable. "Hitler was at our backs," he said in a 1990 conversation, "We were all on the left. There is nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing to be proud of."47
While there is not space to trace Cartier-Bresson's politics during the intervening years, he did maintain his attitude of revolt toward life and capitalism. In 1961, he turned his rebellious lens on American racism.
The impetus for his civil rights reportage originated with Cornell Capa, younger brother of Robert Capa. Cornell was a staff photographer for Life magazine when his brother was killed photographing in Vietnam in 1954. At that point, he assumed the leadership of Magnum Photos. When John F. Kennedy was elected president, Cornell proposed, as a Magnum project, a book that would examine the first 100 days of the new administration. He asked Cartier-Bresson to photograph the chapter covering the administration's efforts, led by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to combat institutionalized racism in the South. Cartier-Bresson's reportage was published in a chapter entitled "Civil Rights: The Strangest Revolt" in the book Let Us Begin: The First 100 Days of the Kennedy Administration.48 The text for the chapter was written by Wallace Westerfeldt, Jr. The situations Cartier-Bresson rl o r sought out and photographed establish that he was using his camera as a weapon to expose racism. While a few of the photographs are generalized statements, most are linked directly to specific events. For example, several rolls show a tent city in rural Tennessee, called "Freedom Village." According to field captions written by Westerfeldt, it was inhabited by "Negro families evicted by white landowners for daring to register to vote in Fayette County, Tenn." Other rolls show an Atlanta slum called "Alpine" where "negroes live in wooden shacks, many without toilet facilities."49
There are photographs of a sit-in at a Nashville drugstore and of African-Americans being demeaned by whites. In one, a black man, hands stuffed in his pockets, adopts a shuffling pose as he listens to a stern-faced bill collector. The latter's open debit book creates a barrier between the two men. Its caption read, "Another installment payment is due and collected."50 The book also published a three-picture sequence on the civil rights movement's "stand-in" tactic. In it, several white men, their faces twisted by anger and hate, block African-American youths from entering a movie theater. Its caption read:
In Nashville, Tennessee, Negroes have won the fight for integrated lunch counters. Now they are fighting-by peaceful methods-for equal entrance in theatres. Here a young Nashville student stands hands in pocket by the theatre's box office while whites try to bar his entrance. 51
While these pictures document overt injustices, one photograph from the civil rights reportage symbolizes racism in a more subtle way. (Figure 3) The only photograph from this reportage to be included in Cartier-Bresson's permanent collection, it shows a ramshackle country store in Hinds County, Mississippi. Cartier-Bresson has captured realistic details which thirty years later strike a viewer as sardonic. Large chunks of siding have fallen away from the store, exposing tar paper and bare boards. A decal on its door promotes Roi Tan as "America's Largest Selling lOC Cigar." Tin signs tacked to the walls advertise Dr. Pepper, Royal Crown Cola, and Viceroy cigarettes. The dirt in front of the store is littered with a hubcap and tin cans.
On this pictorial stage are one white and two African-American men. The white man sprawls at the center of a bench; his extended arms monopolize its entire length. His comfortable slouch, open posture, and smirking expression indicate he is in command of the situation. He has nothing to fear and nothing to share. While his bench appears as ramshackled as the store, it clearly was made as a bench with a solid back and wide seat. In contrast, the black men balance themselves on a makeshift affair that appears to be little more than a plank propped up by four sticks. Their expressions are calculatedly neutral, but their body language betrays life-long habits of cautious submission. Their legs are tightly crossed; their arms are folded protectively across their midsections; they perch gingerly on their precarious plank.
In Cartier-Bresson's subsequent books, this photograph has been decontextualized. It is captioned with only a date and place name, creating an ambiguity about its meaning. Its social criticism appears evident, but viewers cannot be certain whether the criticism of racism is their own construction or whether the photographer intended it. An examination of the historical evidence, including the entire reportage as it was originally published and the verbal context that accompanied it, eliminates the ambiguity. The attack on racism is no accident; it was intended by Cartier-Bresson, and confirmed by Westerfeldt's caption:
The Negro's plight is symbolized in this picture: at Hinds County, Mississippi, outside a grocery store, a white citizen complacently lounges on a large comfortable bench while two Negroes huddle on a small rickety one. Southern whites insist facilities are "separate but equal."52
In addition to these negative portrayals of racism, Cartier-Bresson produced positive photographs promoting integration as an ideal. Two pictures from New Orleans showed "Negro and white inhabitants chat[ting] peacefully with one another" and "White and colored walk[ing] the streets of New Orleans with a sense of equality."53 Other photographs celebrated the accomplishments of African-Americans through education and commerce. The slum scenes were balanced by pictures of a middle-class black neighborhood in Atlanta, where homes cost from $10,000 to $13,000. Several photographs explored the black-owned Citizens Trust Company in Atlanta. Pictures from a biology lab at Tuskegee Institute's veterinary school and from an integrated school in Nashville portrayed the faith that education would bring an end to racism and provide a means for African-Americans to escape its shackles. A photograph from a Nashville elementary school showed two second graders, a black boy and white girl, sharing a school book. Westerfeldt's caption expressed the optimistic hope that school integration coupled with childhood innocence would overcome racism.
This was one of the first schools to put through integration. While at first there was some violence, de-segregation was quickly accepted by both parents and pupils. The children now both play and study together and have forgotten the days when this was considered impossible.54 Cartier-Bresson also photographed several African-American leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, and Dr. Benjamin Mays, president of Morehouse College in Atlanta.
Cartier-Bresson's civil rights reportage provides a case study of how one of the century's foremost photojournalists constructed a picture story that argued for social justice. It comprised three fundamental elements: the problem, the ideal situation, and the means to achieve that ideal. The problem was racism, exposed in the inequality at the Mississippi general store, in the injustice of the tent village, and in the hostility of the confrontation outside the Nashville movie theater. The ideal situation was racial integration and harmony, depicted in the second-grade classroom in Nashville and in the New Orleans street scenes. The forces of change included such self-help methods as education and black business enterprise, the non-violent tactics of sit-ins and stand-ins, and the movement's leaders. There was also a small group of photographs showing the separatist Black Muslim movement in northern cities as an alternative to the mainstream civil rights movement which sought integration.
Cartier-Bresson's 1961 civil rights reportage does not fit comfortably within the current understanding of his work. Although he now insists that photography cannot prove anything, in this reportage he did use his camera as a weapon to expose a social problem and promote social change. Although he has portrayed himself as an intuitive photographer who merely wandered the globe capturing whatever presented itself as visually interesting, in this case, he purposefully assembled a number of elements to tell a complex story. Although he disdains documentation and denies that he ever did reportage, in 1961 he recorded an historic struggle in the form of a picture story. Let Us Begin reached a small audience. The book is now out of print and largely forgotten. Only one photograph from Cartier-Bresson's reportage, the Hinds County store, has survived in his published anthologies and permanent collection, but its original intent has been obscured. Because of this decontextualization, the fact that on occasion Cartier-Bresson worked as a socially concerned photographer with the intention of exposing injustice has also been obscured.
This and other decontextualizations, such as the political neutering of the 1936 Banks of the Marne photograph, have contributed to the attempt to reposition Cartier-Bresson solely as an art photographer. The attempt to minimize or deny the journalistic intentions of one of the century's preeminent photojournalists offers important lessons. Foremost among them is that critical interpretation must be grounded in historical context.
NOTES
1. Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), no pagination.
2. The 35mm Leica was invented by Ernst Barlach, an employee of the E. Leitz optics firm in Germany; it came on the market in the late 1920s.
3. "General Classification of Cartier-Bresson's Contacts and Negs in Paris files," Magnum Photos, Paris bureau. This working document catalogs Cartier-Bresson's black and white negatives, roll by roll.
4. See the index to Henri Cartier-Bresson: Photoportraits (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1985) and "Archives Henri Cartier-Bresson: Personalities," Magnum Photos, Paris.
5. Claude Cookman, "Henri Cartier-Bresson: Primary and Secondary Bibliography," History of Photography, Vol. 19, No. 4, Wmter 1995, 359-372.
6. Michael Kimmelman, "With Henri Cartier-Bresson, Surrounded by His Peers," New York Tv, 20 August 1995, HI.
7. Lincoln Kirstein and Beaumont Newhall, The Photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1947), 10. In fact, most photojournalists have been interested not just in the so-called "main event," but in the reactions of ordinary people.
8. Ingrid Sischy, "Photography: Good Intentions," The New Yorker, 9 Sept. 1991, 89.
9. James T. Soby, "Two Contemporary Photographers," Saturday Review, 5 Nov. 1955, 33.
10. John Szarkowski, Wall label for Cartier-Bresson: Recent Photographs, Exhibition at the Museum of Modem Art, New York City, 1968. Szarkowski's limiting criteria of "hierarchical events" and "newsworthy episodes" ignores the tradition of magazine photojournalism that was concerned with the common person and that encouraged the photojournalist to take a personal point of view. In his 1973 exhibition catalog From the Picture Press, Szarkowski offered a more inclusive definition of photojournalism; he found in the sixty-eight photographs the same quality of ordinary life that he used five years previously to deny CartierBresson's photojournalism. (From the Picture Press [New York: The Museum of Modem Art, 1972], 2.) 11. Peter Galassi, Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Work (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1987), 46. 12. Ibid., 48, n59.
13. Andre Breton, Manrfestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1924, 1969), 14.
14. Ibid., 26
15. "Coup d'oeil American,"Camera, July 1976, 45. Cartier-Bresson has recounted versions of this anecdote to at least nine other interviewers.
16. Henri Cartier-Bresson, "Reality has the last word," New York Runes, 9 July 1975, 31. Emphasis in the original. 17. Gilles Mora, "He.ri Cartier-Bresson, Gilles Mora: Conversation, "Les Cahiers de la Photographie, special number, 1968, 117, both quotes this paragraph.
18. Shelia T. Seed, "Henri Cartier-Bresson, Interview,"Popular Photography, May 1974, 108. 19. Yves Bourde, "Un entretien avec Henri CartierBresson,"Le Monde, 5 Sept. 1974, 13.
20. Allain Desvergnes, "HCB i la question: A Arles, le discret Cartier-Bresson a bien voulu parlor de la photo,"Photo, Sept. 1979, 98.
21. Henri Cartier Bresson, annotations to manuscript, archives of the author. In the summer of 1994, Cartier-Bresson made extensive annotations to a manuscript by the author. Both quotes this paragraph.
22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid.
26. Bourde, Le Monde, 13. As founder of the Parisian art publishing house Verve, Teriade (Stratis Eleftheriadis, 1897-1983), was friend and confidant to many of the century's great artists. 27. Ibid.
28. Text requested by Mr. Lee Hall for the double issue on Photography (Le Magazine)," unpublished manuscript at Magnum Photos, Paris. See also, Mora, Les Cahiers, 120.
29. Letters from Carter Bresson to Elliott Erwin, 13 June 1966 and 19 June 1966, copies in Cartier-Bresson's personal archives.
30. The Decisive Moment, all quotes this paragraph. 31. Henri Cartier-Bresson, no title, Creative Camera, March 1969, 92.
32. The Decisive Moment, all quotes this paragraph. 33. Henri Cartier-Bresson, "La photographic, qu'est-ce c'est? Un entretien avec H. Cartier-Bresson."Temiognage Chretien, 28 May 1954, 6.
34. Magazine photojournalism began in Germany in the late 1920s with the convergence of several factors: 1) the rise of numerous mass-circulation illustrated magazines such as the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung and the Municher Illustrierte Presse, 2) the appearance of photographers and the network of agencies who represented them, 3) the development of the picture story as a sequence of related photographs, and 4) the small camera which made candid photography possible. (See Tim N. Gidal, Modern Photojournalism: Origin and Evolution, 1910-1933 (New York: Collier, 1972). In France, Lucien Vogel used the German magazines as models in creating Vu (Seen), which in 1933, became the first magazine to publish Cartier-Bresson's work. Capa and Chim, two of many eastern European Jewish photojournalists who fled Germany with the rise of Nazism, initiated their friend and colleague Cartier-Bresson into the tradition of magazine photojournalism.
35. Stefan Lorant, in J. R. Whiting, Photography is a Language (New York: Ziff-Davis, 1946), 22. 36. Alain Sayag, "Pictorialism," in A. de Gouvion Saint-Cyr, et al., 20th Century French Photography (London: Barbican Art Gallery, 1988), 16.
37. This photograph, as with most in the early 1930s, was taken as part of Cartier-Bresson's personal exploration of the world. It was only during 1936, when he began working for Ce Soir and Regards, and afterward that almost all of his work was photographed on assignment or self-assignment for publication. 38. Bourde, Le Monde, 13.
39. Galassi, Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Years, 16. 40. Andre Pioyre de Mandiargues, Le Desordre de la memoire: Entretiens avec Francine Mallet, (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 67.
41. Richard Whelan, Robert Capa: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1985), 58.
42. Nicholas Nabokov, Bagazh: Memoirs of a Russian Cosmopolitan (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 201.
43. Ce Soir and Regards shared editors, including French Communist Party leaders Louis Aragon and Paul VaillantCouturier. Cartier-Bresson's credits in both publications used only the first half of his surname. The Cartier-Bressons were listed among the "200 families" of the haute bourgeoisie whom the left blamed for the economic ills suffered by the working class.
44. Rory Coonan, "The man who caught the world unawares,"The Times (of London), 20 Sept. 1984, 8. 45. Michael Gantier, "Le red epingle de Cartier-Bresson,"Le Spectacle du Monde, May 1989, 64.
46. Georges Sadoul, "Camping de fortune aux portes de la ville," Regards, 237, (28 July 1938), 4; Georges Sadoul, "Tout le confort de la ville, banlieues de toil," Regards 242 (1 Sept. 1938), 16. To base the claim that Cartier-Bresson photographed with a social conscience on just two photographs may not seem convincing. In fact, these two represent numerous others taken throughout his career. A conservative listing of the most prominent ones includes: four immigrant workers on the Quai de Javel, Paris, 1932; a group of laborers reacting to a policeman, Marseilles, 1932; a man in a tattered suit sleeping on a bench, Spain, 1933; a man lying in a pile of refuse, Marseilles, 1932; a derelict sleeping in a gutter in Mexico City, 1934; laborers at a
canteena, Mexico, 1934; the survivors of the Nazi massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane, 1944; bystanders watching a member of the French Academy, Paris, 1953; miners in Lorraine, 1959; homeless people sleeping in front of an IBM window display, Paris, 1968; two north Africans sweeping the Champs Elysees, 1968; an inmate in a New Jersey prison, 1975.
47. Conversation with Cartier-Bresson, Paris, 22 April 1990.
48. Let Us Begin: The First 100 Days of the Kennedy Administration, Cornell Capa, ed., (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961). There were good reasons to ask Cartier-Bresson to photograph this topic. He had a long-standing appreciation for African-Americans and their culture, dating to his appreciation of the jazz performed by black expatriates in Parisian clubs in the 1920s. He also had maintained a friendship with the African-American poet Langston Hughes since the time they shared an apartment in Mexico City in 1934.
49. Wallace Westerfeldt Jr., "The Negro in the South," memorandum to John Morris, Magnum Photos, Paris, no pagination.
50. Let Us Begin, 88.
51. Westerfeldt memorandum.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
Claude Cookman is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism at Indiana University.
Copyright Journalism History Spring 1998