Word: cartier-bresson
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...HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON: THE EARLY WORK, 1929-1934, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Some 75 prints from the period when Cartier-Bresson was creating one of the most original and influential styles in the history of photography. Through...
...Henri Cartier-Bresson once said he approached his camera as a "combination of the psychiatrist's couch, a machine gun and a warm kiss." That language has a familiar ring to it. The shock compactions of imagery, the off-kilter linkage of sex, death and Freud -- it all smacks of surrealism. But who would expect to hear it from a great photojournalist? Cartier-Bresson's fame is based on four decades of incomparable camera reporting. Mention his name and what comes to mind is his great surveys of life in China, the Soviet Union and his native France...
...persuasive new exhibit that is now at New York City's Museum of Modern Art is going to change that. Curator Peter Galassi has mounted 90 photographs that Cartier-Bresson, 79, took at the outset of his career, mostly from 1932 through 1934. During those years he put aside his ambitions as a painter and began stalking the streets of three continents with a lightweight Leica and a potent surrealist intuition, an eye for the unearthly subtext of ordinary scenes. Add his powerful gift for spatial arrangement, and the result, says Galassi, is "one of the great, concentrated episodes...
...that brief span of time, Cartier-Bresson took dozens of his best-known pictures: Spanish children playing in the rubble of a building, a reflected figure leaping across a puddle behind the Gare St.-Lazare, Mexican prostitutes popping weirdly out of doorway slots. Galassi is not the first to cite surrealism as the force that conferred upon this early work its compelling strangeness, but he makes the decisive case. By the end of this exhibit's seven-city tour -- it goes to Detroit, Chicago, San Diego, Framingham, Mass., Houston and Ottawa through May 1989 -- no one will be able...
Because of his later reputation as a photojournalist and the co-founder of the Magnum photo agency, it is easy to forget Cartier-Bresson's debt to Andre Breton, surrealism's chief standard-bearer and truest believer. Breton and his circle of poets and artists wanted to revolutionize both consciousness and society through the purposeful absurdities of the unconscious. To dislodge conventional habits of mind, they practiced unpremeditated methods of creation, "unguided" sketching and automatic writing. Moved by their example, Cartier-Bresson realized that his Leica was the most automatic art instrument of all, one that could make split-second...