The New York Times periodically offers readers an opportunity to spend ten minutes looking at an image. Usually, they are oil paintings but this latest one is an iconic photograph by the much revered Henri Cartier-Bresson.
I have been a fan of his for a long time now despite my 'ennui' in front of many Black and White photos. I am a colour sort of fellow. But, HCB is my great exception to this visual bias on my part.
I have left the following article intact so one can read the follow-up to this exercise by the NYT. (see below)
I can explain why I like HCB so much in a few words. He was an artist (as he himself explained in many articles) who liked to find "des lieux" (places, or spots) where he could 'wait out a picture' that is to say, wait for something to transpire. He liked spaces which lent themselves to a visual contradiction and/or ironic context.
This is my own understanding of course. But I've read accounts by him describing how would sometimes wait whole afternoons uncomfortably in cramped spaces just for drama, a cat or dog, human or otherwise, to enter his frame and allowing him to grab a photo. He was like a creature who waits patiently for his prey to approach.
Like the Real Estate people always like to say: "Location, Location, Location". Well, it was apparently the same for HCB. But I would point out that for artists (of any kind), I think "Relationships, Relationships, Relationships" are more apt. All great art is about relationships in the work. And in this extraordinary photo there are indeed, many!
And like it is pointed out in the explanation below, HCB loved spontaneity. Me too! For I paint quickly and spontaneously for it is my favourite mode. But then, I'm obliged because twilight seems to start out casually like a butterfly at first but then transforms so fast that it can move like a freight train, and I must catch it.
So though I also take lots of photos myself but they are always in colour like in paintings.
(go do the ten minute exercise at the NYT!
Thanks for spending 10 minutes and 10 seconds with the photo. If you want to look a little longer, just scroll back up and press “Continue.”
Now, we’ll tell you a bit about it.
In 1932, as he was walking around Paris with his small Leica camera, a young man named Henri Cartier-Bresson came upon a construction fence behind the Gare Saint-Lazare train station. He peeked through.
There, with his camera wedged between wooden slats, he saw a man running across his view and pressed the shutter. The result would become one of the most influential photographs in history.
In the frame, time seems to be stopped. The man is suspended millimeters from the water, as if he may never hit that puddle.
“A second later and the photograph would have been lost to me forever,” Cartier-Bresson recalled years later.
That jump is the obvious focus of the photograph, but the scene is full of visual connections. There are so many, in fact, and in such alignment, that it’s easy to imagine the scene as staged. In reality, the image was captured at precisely the perfect time — the “decisive moment,” as Cartier-Bresson would call it.
“On one side, you can see it’s very clearly composed,” said Clément Chéroux, the director of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, and formerly the chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art. “It looks like it was composed by a painter that was using a frame and making sure everything is at the right position. And on the other side, there is something which is related to this idea of chance encounters. These two things are completely opposed, and he was able to reconcile these two ideas.”
Mr. Chéroux is our guide to this photograph today.
Photography once relied on clunky equipment and long exposures, but Cartier-Bresson’s Leica was hand-held and allowed him to snap quick pictures like this one. It took him exactly three days to master the new camera, he told The New Yorker in 1989.
He prowled the streets of Paris looking for what Mr. Chéroux called “small miracles.” This is his most famous.
At the start of your 10 minutes and 10 seconds, you might have noticed this delightful connection, with the shape of our puddle jumper and the poster of the dancer in the background:
But there are other doubles in the image, too. These two men, and their double reflections:
The doubled dancer posters (and their reflections):
The words RAILOWSKY RAILOWSKY (and their reflections):
(It’s actually a poster — probably an advertisement — for Alexander Brailowsky, a pianist. The ‘B’ is hidden.)
To Mr. Chéroux, all the mirroring has a psychological effect, evoking the feeling you might get with an inkblot or a Rorschach test.
“You are projecting yourself into this inkblot,” he said. “You want to find significance or a sense of meaning in this doubling effect. I truly believe that this is part of the fascination of this image.”
At the end of the 1920s, Mr. Chéroux said, Cartier-Bresson was influenced by the Surrealist group — writers, poets, artists who held court in cafes challenging conventional wisdom and exploring ideas that came from the unconscious mind.
“All the Surrealists were into the idea of the chance encounter,” he said. “The whole idea that where you were walking in the streets of Paris and you were encountering: encountering people, encountering beautiful things, encountering just light, beautiful light, or encountering a strange situation.”
Cartier-Bresson caught these moments throughout his career, like at the top of a spiral staircase in France, with a bicycle whizzing by:
And here in Greece, a young girl in an Escheresque scene, dashing through the shadows:
Notice the black border on these two images. Notably, Cartier-Bresson said he never cropped his photographs, leaving the edges of the film to show the full frame, as he would have seen it through his viewfinder.
But our image is an exception. If you look at the original negative, the blurred shadow of a fence post crept into the frame. This decisive moment was nearly spoiled, but it was saved by the final crop.
By all accounts, he took great joy in these moments of visual connection.
“For him, photography was a kind of meditation,” Mr. Chéroux said. “Even if everything is going faster today, I truly believe that photography is a way of slowing, slowing down the pace of the world.”
It almost seems impossible that all these elements lined up on that day in 1932 and that one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century was right there to see it.
But the truth is, even if Cartier-Bresson had not been there to capture it, the man would have still jumped, still looked like the dancer on the poster in the background and still had a perfect reflection.
As his career proved, these small miracles are around us all the time — whether we’re looking or not.
You may be holding a camera in your hand right now. Maybe go take a walk and tell us what you see.
