The Decisive Moment
"Manufactured" or staged photography does not concern me. And if I make a
judgment, it can only be on a psychological or sociological level. For me, the camera is a sketchbook, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity and the
master of the instant, which questions and decides simultaneously. In order to "give a meaning" to the world, one has to feel onelf involved in what he frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, a discipline of mind, nsitivity, and a n of geometry.
To take photographs means to recognize both the fact itlf and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis.
As far as I am concerned, taking photographs is means of understanding,
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which cannot be parated from other means of visual expression. It is a way of shooting, of freeing onelf, not of proving or asrting one's own originality. It is a way of life.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Decisive Moments - Henri Cartier-Bresson
gender是什么意思Part 1: Early Years
From: Photography with Peter Marshall
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Some time in 1931, a three naked young African boys ran joyfully towards the surf of a Liberian beach and were caught in near-silhouette by the camera of a Hungarian photographer, Martin Munkacsi, shortly to become better known in the USA as a fashion photographer for Harpers Bazaar. His picture captured the freedom, grace and spontaneity of their movement and their joy at being alive.
furnasAt the same time, a young French art student, Henri Cartier-Bresson, was also in Africa, on the Ivory Coast. This picture was one of tho that caught his attention, inspiring him to put down his paint-brush on his return to France and devote himlf to photography. This was indeed a decisive moment for photography, as he was to become the most famous photographer of the twentieth century.
Cartier-Bresson was born in 1908 to a family of wealthy and well-connected French textile manufacturers, and a small allowance from them provided him with the financial support to develop his interests in photography in a more independent manner than many of his contemporaries. Although often referred to as a photojournalist (and many of his pictures were widely published in the press), he ldom t out to record stories or events, concentrating on scenes on the sidelines that attracted him visually or aesthetically and were often marginal or irrelevant to the news story.
Like many photographers of the 1930's his interests lay mainly with the lives and times of ordinary people - the ri of photojournalism in this decade was very much connected to the ri of the left-wing Popular Front in Europe. Typically, when photographing the 1938 Coronation of King George VI in London he shows not the crowning of royalty, but the crowd crammed on the ba of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square and at their feet in a litter of discarded newspapers a fellow citizen who has perhaps celebrated too liquidly and is sleeping.
Many of his pictures are much less certain in context and more open to interpretation than typical photojournalism. In one, two men stand in front of a sacking fence, presumably to screen some spectacle from tho who have not paid for entry. Further from the camera a cloth-capped worker gazes intently, no to the barrier, while the clor figure, who coat, bowler hat and luxuriant mous
tache mark as middle-class, holds himlf erect, hands behind back and at a slight distance from the barrier, turning his head slightly toward the camera and regarding the photographer from the corner of his eye. The difference between the two is further emphasized by their paration by one of the posts supporting the sacking.
Cartier-Bresson was more an artist using a camera to catch the surreal in everyday situations than a photojournalist, arching for esnces rather than documenting facts. He became friends with photojournalists Robert Capa and Chim (David Seymour) in Paris in the early 30's sharing a studio with them, and joining them and
others in the cafes for prolonged political discussions (no one ever talked about photography); it was Capa advid him to avoid becoming labeled as "the little surrealist photographer" by calling himlf a photojournalist.人力培训
Decisive Moments - Henri Cartier-Bresson上海环球雅思怎么样
Part 2: The Decisive Moment
怎样画彩妆In a tremendous period of activity in his first years as a photographer he produced a number of pictur
es using a Leica that became classics of photography, and one in particular that came in many ways to stand for his whole work: a man attempting to leap a puddle in Paris, blurred in flight, caught just at the moment before the inevitable splash, the tiny gap between his leading foot and its reflection riveting our attention; as well as being mirrored in the water the leap is also repeated by the dancer in posters on the fence behind (and, less obviously by the hands of the station clock.) Here we have the text-book example of the 'decisive moment'. Cartier-Bresson's first public exhibition was in New York, at the Gallery Julian Levy in 1932, and this was followed by others in Spain and Mexico (with Manuel Alvarez Bravo), where he went as a photographer for an ethnographic exhibition.
In the 30's he also worked with movies, studying in the USA with Paul Strand and later working as an assistant to the famous French director Jean Renoir on his classic 'La Règle du Jeu' (The Rules of the Game)and filming his own documentary in Republican Spain.
During the Second World War he was taken prisoner by the Germans and escaped, then worked for the Resistance before photographing the occupation and liberation of France. Towards the end of the war, rumors had reached the USA that he had been killed, and the Muum of Modern Art began to prepare a 'posthumous' show; fortunately he was able to go to New York in 1946 to help with its preparation. Together with this 1947 show, MOMA also published the first book of his work, The Phot
ographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with texts by Lincoln Kirstein and Beaumont Newhall.
It was however his next book, Images a la Sauvette, better known by the title chon by its American publishers, The Decisive Moment that put his photography and ideas to a world-wide public. The French title us the term for illegal street trading and could perhaps be translated as 'Images on the Run' or 'Stolen Images' and perhaps more accurately reflects the dynamism of Cartier-Bresson's better work than the more static suggestion of the 'decisive moment' which has however become indelibly linked with his photography.
Shortly after the war, Cartier-Bresson found himlf a founder member of Magnum, which his friend Capa had dreamt up. Cartier-Bresson photographed around the world for Magnum, becoming the first western photographer to photograph freely in the post-war Soviet Union.
新东方住宿部In India he photographed the dying Gandhi (his discreet, respectful and unen approach through the gap in some curtains on this occasion proving successful where
关于爱情的英文诗Margaret Bourke-White, working for Life, had brashly intruded and had the film ripped from her cameras). In China, he photographed the last surviving Imperial Eunuchs in Peking as it was falling to the communists.
He also was a fine portrait photographer, photographing many famous people, including artists such as Matis and politicians.
For me, however, his core work is from France, Spain, Italy and Greece, perhaps Ireland and a few odd pictures from elwhere. Away from the Catholic and the Mediterranean cultures clost to his native France his touch ems less sure.
His view of England, for example, is in some respects a foreigner's stereotype, with pictures related to royal or state occasions, wealthy society events, expensive fee-paying education, the City of London and - as a curious contrast - 3 little girls in coats coming back from the corner shop past a broken down back wall in 60's slum clearance foggy Liverpool. The pictures are fine, but was this England?
Decisive Moments - Henri Cartier-Bresson
Part 3: Ideas and effects
In some of his pictures - described to me once as the 'waiters' - we get the impression of a stage t where the photographer has come across a scene and stood waiting for a person to appear in the rig
ht position; to me the are the least interesting of his works, but they are the most copied by the numerous photographers inspired by his work. It was perhaps the preponderance of the that led a younger generation of photographers to revolt against his approach in the 1950's - notably Robert Frank and William Klein.
As a French intellectual, Cartier-Bresson not surprisingly had clear and unbending ideas about photography. For him the camera was an instrument to ize an instant from the flux, and it was at this point of making the exposure that the photograph was created. He refud to allow the vision that he had then to be altered by cropping, insisting that his printer u the whole negative and show the black border produced by its edge around the frame.
Certainly in his early years he had little interest in the print as an object (some of the most highly prized 'vintage' prints are frankly poor). The print was just a means to realize the vision rather than being en as an art object.
On the older Leica bodies it was easy to misalign film when loading in a hurry; one of his best pictures from Ireland shows a religious procession behind a banner; along its ba are a ries of sprocket holes partly intruding into the picture which continues on the film in the gaps between them. The effect is like crenellation, accidentally reinforcing the grim and military nature of the scene.
Cartier-Bresson's viewpoint was always that of the unen obrver, the 'fly on the wall', recording apparently without interaction with the subject. He trained himlf to u the camera - almost always a Leica rangefinder camera, usually with a standard 50mm lens - without having to look at its controls. He often hid it from view until the moment of exposure when it would ri rapidly to his eye. By using a single lens he was able to position himlf exactly in the correct position.
unforgettable
Years ago a photographer friend described to me how he had worked when she accompanied him as a guide in Ireland; he would position her between him and a likely subject, standing talking until his was ready to take a picture, his camera shielded by her. Rapidly the camera would ri to his eye as he shot over her shoulder. Sometimes she was shoved abruptly and firmly out of the way. His single-minded approach to getting his picture offended some of his collaborators and occasionally tho that he photographed - the jovial French farmer stretching out a hand to the photographer's companion in a 1955 picture was apparently shortly afterwards chasing him with a pitchfork!
Exhibitions across the world celebrated his 90th birthday in 1998; although he has photographed little in the last 25 years his influence on photography continues to be strong.
OTHER WEB SITES
•Tete a Tete - National Portrait Gallery
Text and portraits from this UK gallery show.
•Peter Fetterman Gallery Text and pictures
•Cartier-Bresson - Afterimage
A good lection of his work and a link to another fine French photographer of
the period, Willy Ronis.
•Cartier-Bresson - Photology
fogA fine lection of his work, including many of his best-known pictures online.
•Cartier-Bresson - Magnum
A brief biography and three ts of pictures you can access from the drop-
down list.
•Cartier-Bresson - Italian page
Site with a good lection of portraits (Ritratti) and other pictures as well as a biography in Italian.
•Route 66 - Cruising the American Dream
A fine illustrated feature on Robert Frank.
•Photography 99 - Howard Greenberg Gallery
Great show from the gallery featuring Candy Store, 1954-55 by William Klein.
