When asked if, as he has stated on several occasions, he considers that Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) was the “eye of the 20th century” – in reference to the fact that from 1930 to 1970 he photographed almost all the important events of that time. tumultuous period, including the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, life in Russia after the death of Stalin, Mao’s victory in China or the decolonization processes in Africa and Asia–, Urich Pohlmann, answers yes.
But immediately, the curator of the monographic exhibition on the photographer, which bears the title Watch! Watch! Watch!clarifies: “He photographed important politicians – for example, in Cuba he photographed Che Guevara and Fidel Castro – but I think those images are not the best.” “The best ones,” he continues, “are the ones from everyday life, like the ones of a woman standing in front of him in a uniform or the ones of an older woman holding a rifle in her hand in front of a wedding window.”
It is from this perspective that Pohlmann has selected the 240 gelatin silver copies that the Fondation Cartier-Bresson has donated to the KBr Fundación Mapfre center, in Barcelona, to illustrate Watch! Watch! Watch! (in reference to the fact that Cartier-Bresson himself claimed that all he did was “look, look, look”), an exhibition that can be visited until January 26, 2025. These are copies made during the author’s lifetime. , many of them between the sixties and the eighties, since Cartier-Bresson prohibited further copies of his negatives from being made after his death.
Another example that the curator shows of how the legendary French photojournalist reflected the reality of the moment through ordinary people, far from the great protagonists of History but always influenced by them, are the images of the coronation of King George VI from England, where Cartier-Bresson fixes the camera on the expectant crowd, especially on an old woman who climbs onto two men’s horses to get a better view.
Also, on the occasion of Gandhi’s cremation in India, Pohlmann points out an image – located at the end of the entire series dedicated to the burial with his successor Pandit Nehru in the foreground – in which a child can be seen playing with some ashes. “They are Gandhi’s ashes and the boy is his grandson,” says the commissioner, thus commenting on the allegory that no matter how great we are in life, we all end up in ashes.
The surreal years
Pohlmann recommends viewing the exhibition in order, as it is arranged chronologically, thus explaining both the author’s stylistic transitions and the events he portrayed. He explains that Cartier-Bresson, despite being from a family of textile businessmen from the Ile-de-France region, at the age of 18 broke up with the family business and went to study painting in Montparnasse with André Lhote.
In interwar Paris he made contact with the artistic avant-garde and joined the surrealist movement. From that time, full of experimentation and ingenuity, comes his theory of the “decisive instant”, which is expressed with special clarity in the famous snapshot taken behind the Saint-Lazare station, in Place de la Europe, Paris in 1932.
In it you can see a man captured at the moment of jumping over a puddle, suspended in the air and with the reflection of his jump frozen on the surface of the puddle.
But after a trip to the Ivory Coast in 1930, Cartier-Bresson finally decided to focus on photography as a professional, dedicated to the incipient photojournalism, which would be decisive in the following decades to portray the great events that shook the 20th century. His first assignment abroad was in Spain in 1933 to cover the elections won by the Popular Front.
The liberation of Paris
There he portrays the lives of people at street level, with a markedly social accent, leaving surrealist experimentation behind. Although Pohlmann points out that “she never stopped searching for an artistic component in her images that went beyond the message, just as her contemporary would also do. Lee Millerwhich had a parallel career until the end of World War II.”
But unlike Miller, who would abandon the profession in the postwar period, overwhelmed by alcoholism and the horrors she had had to photograph during the war, “Cartier-Bresson continued for 30 more years and had a longer career with a broader professional perspective.” “, points out the commissioner of Watch, watch, watch“becoming the first Western photojournalist to portray life in Soviet Russia after the death of Stalin or the fall of Shanghai in 1949 to Mao Zedong.”
But before these famous works, whose images are also present in the exhibition at the KBr center, Cartier-Bresson, as a communist sympathizer, was present in the Spanish Civil War in 1937, where he shot the film victory of life. He would later return to Paris and enlist in the army.
In 1940 he was captured by the Nazis and entered a prison camp, from which he managed to escape in 1943 to immediately join the resistance, with which he participated in the liberation of Paris. With his compact 35 mm Leica camera in hand, he photographs the end of the German occupation, always looking at the people on the street and their way of suffering the vicissitudes of history.
But these images, also present in Watch! Watch! Watch! have their own story behind them. “Their existence was not known until 1969,” says Pohlmann, “since they had been completely forgotten.” “He had kept them in a cookie box and it was towards the end of his professional career when he found them while organizing files,” says the commissioner. Some of the images are shocking due to their harshness, such as those of the execution of collaborationist women.
The popular classes seen by Cartier-Bresson
“As a communist sympathizer in his youth, he was always interested in photographing the living conditions of the working classes wherever he was,” observes the curator, who adds that with this spirit Cartier-Bresson traveled through his native France, but also through Spain. , the United States – where in 1947 he participated in the creation of the Magnum Agency together with Robert Capa, David Seymour “Chim”, Maria Eisner and Rita Vandivert among other legendary photographers –, post-revolutionary Cuba or Khrushchev’s Russia.
The photographs he took in Russia in the mid-fifties, at a time when no other Westerner could take portraits and publish them outside the USSR, show a panorama far removed from the depressive atmosphere that was described from the West, which is why “they were a impact on public opinion,” according to Pohlmann.
“After Stalin’s death there was a kind of liberalization of Russian society; Moscow was changing and he focused specifically on how women lived, who worked in factories but also had free time and danced or went shopping,” explains the commissioner.
Finally, Pohlmann shows another of the exhibition’s gems, a documentary film made by the photographer based on static images. “The photographs I used to make it are not preserved.” he comments, “just the movie.” He adds that “a friend of the Afro-American poet Langston Hughes and the Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, together they created a film group in the 1930s with which they tried to replicate the work of Soviet directors such as Sergei Eisenstein.”
The exhibition closes in the portrait room, since Cartier-Bresson did not forget to portray the protagonists of the story, but Pohlmann has preferred for this occasion to select heroes that are less bellicose and richer in cultural contributions, such as a young Truman Capote or an elderly Henri Matisse.
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