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The New York Times obit was misleading. While certainly the headline describing the great photographer who died last August as an “Artist Who Used Lens” succinctly categorized Cartier-Bresson in the most general terms, the specifics that followed sloshed over his true contribution when it mentioned him specifically only as using his Leica to “bear witness to many of the 20 th century's biggest events, from the Spanish Civil War to the German Occupation of France to the partition of India to the Chinese revolution to the French student uprisings of 1968.
Yes he was there and yes, he took pictures, but “bearing witness” may lead you to conclude he produced cohesive sequenced magazine-style picture stories of these events with layouts in mind. Generally not so.
Open any of the many picture book collections of his photographs and you will be startled to discover that seldom do two photographs have any direct connection with each other. Each stands by itself. “These photographs taken at random by a wandering camera do not in any way attempt to give a general picture of any of the countries in which that camera has been at large.” So wrote Cartier-Bresson in the introduction to his monumental 1952 book “The Decisive Moment.”
The sole sequenced pictures therein are of Mahatma Gandhi's last days and funeral, taken after Cartier-Bresson had learned from his fellow Magnum photographers the makings of a picture story, a financial necessity for the struggling young picture agency. The people and places of photographs in his later books such as “The Europeans” and “The People of Moscow” have no direct connection with each other. (In the Decisive Moment introduction, Cartier-Bresson excoriates the compromises necessary in the producing of magazine pictures stories remarking “there are other ways of communicating our photographs than through publication in magazines. Exhibitions, for instance; and the book form, which is almost a form of permanent exhibition.”).
And it is in Cartier-Bresson's books (or in exhibitions when they occur) that you will discover the true Cartier-Bresson, individual picture by picture. And you will come to the startling realization that he is a fellow amateur photographer taking individual snapshots just as you and I would.
How seldom the pictures show historical events or known personages. Most often they are of ordinary people in locations we might be ourselves. In his later books, Cartier-Bresson often shortens his captions to a single line, indicating the general location, but totally ignoring the people and the event he has photographed. You are expected to concentrate on the photographs themselves. Most show incredible compositional balance. Stark stairways connect subjects, three-dimensional, jagged shadows and brilliant sunlit walls frame a distant central figure of a fleeing woman. An office worker at right, peering around a corner surely is looking at a woman who only appears in the picture as a high-heeled leg entering the office from the far left. Again and again he surprises us and shames us with what he has seen and recorded—and what we have missed ourselves by not paying attention to what is around us, not being patient enough to find the right angle and framing and not waiting for the precise right moment.
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