“The Photographs I Love” 10 – Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson. Hong Kong, late September 1949

We have arrived at the last choice for the first series of ten photographs that I love.

I know that by looking at the blank box you are thinking of a joke.

But it's not a joke, nor is it meant to be a mere provocation.

However, I forgot to tell you who we are talking about: obviously I left Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer born in 1908 and died in 2004, for the last.

Only him after Koudelka, or rather, all the others after him.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

For a long time I tried to start writing about the master, but I always got stuck. After all, everything has already been said and written about his perfection, and I also feel great embarrassment to write about him: I feel like a piffero player who wants to comment on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

What else can be added about the one who has been called “the gaze of the century”?

But above all, how can I choose a single photograph? It is already difficult for many other photographers, but with him it's a tragedy.

Or I can choose those three, four iconic images, which everyone has seen for good or bad once in their life, including jumps on the puddle, racing bicycles or Magritte-like men with bowler hat and mustaches. Or you opt for lesser known images, so rich and varied that you could choose one photograph a month for years...

Brussels, 1932

Nor do I want to analyze his photographs; I already did it for one of his famous shots in a previous article, and I think there are many books about him, more interesting than my words.

Very nice book, by the way, “Images and words”, in which various artists, photographers, directors, writers, have chosen a photo of Cartier-Bresson explaining the reason for their love for that image.

More or less what I tried to do myself in this series of ten photos.

So why is there an empty rectangle, with the caption Hong Kong, late September 1949?

 

I admit this is a story I did not know, and I read it in the latest monumental book “In China”, recently published.

Wonderful book, with images that leave you speechless, as always.

It was among his first assignments, 18 months after founding the Magnum Agency; he left in 1948 for Beijing to make a report commissioned by LIFE magazine on the fall of the Kuomintang government and the founding of the People's Republic of China. From Beijing he moved to Shanghai where he made the famous cover photo “Gold Rush”.

Eventually he will stay there for ten months, so fascinated by Chinese culture and tradition to the point of converting to Buddhism and returning ten years later to finish his work.

The book came out in 1958.

“Gold Rush”. Shanghai, China, 1948

Henri Cartier-Bresson is widely regarded as the pinnacle of photography. The list of photographers from every corner of the globe, who cite him as inspiration and as an unattainable peak of perfection, aesthetic and emotional, is very long.

The famous head-eye-heart axis which is one of his most used quotes.

After all, his obsessive perfection and formal and compositional cleanliness was also due to his eye accustomed to drawing.

In a 1969 interview, he replied to those who asked him why photography and why he had chosen the lens as a way of expression:

         “Draw body to body with life.”

 

Life was basically his obsession, to be “in life” - we would say in a phenomenological sense – and to be able to capture it in its unfolding, in the perfect moment (the decisive moment), before everything returns to its chaotic vortex.

In this he was the absolute Master.    

        “Personally I don't think about photography,
        I worry about life.”

 

So what's the point of that empty rectangle, called the “missing photo”?

It makes me think of Zen philosophy: if you can't reach fullness, then start with emptiness.

It's true, if it's impossible to choose a single photograph of him because it is part of a magnificent and insuperable whole, then perhaps it makes more sense to approach the negation of that fullness, even if – precisely Zen philosophy teaches – the two levels negate and complement each other.

Henri Cartier-Bresson was on the ferry in Hong Kong, he sees a very beautiful Chinese girl with soldiers looking at her, he would like to take that picture but it's too close, on them.

And photography is like fencing, he will write, you can't face it body to body.

Ironic for those who said that photography is “drawing close to life”.

This photo never existed because he didn't have – this time! - the right time to frame and shoot: he lost it.

He has just arrived in Hong Kong and already regrets a failure. But he does not give up, he writes down all the details of that photograph on the 426 roll, intended for his colleagues at Magnum, in order not to lose it.

“Memory is very important, memory of every photograph taken, galloping at the pace of the event,” he wrote in “Images à la Sauvette” in 1952.

And here he writes and thinks as a draftsman, as he who reproduces on the white paper what he cannot see but remembers, repeating in lines what is before his inner eyes.

Only those who know the secrets of drawing know well that magic of opening the archives of memory to “copy” in mind, on the paper, a reality that is not in front of us in the present. To do this, you need a sharp eye and a rock-solid memory.

So he writes to his wife Eli, about that moment:

“Pix of a girl in the ferry between HK and Kowloon. I missed an excellent pix of that girl a few minutes earlier. Eli (HCB's wife) called my attention but it was too late to me: on the quay a few British soldiers with their equipment leaning on a railing and looking in a dispassionate way over their shoulder to that dame passing close to them, she had such a small waist, and a long black tight robe down to her ankles and split very high on the side discovering to the eyes of the soldiers but too late for the photographer's a shapely leg and a bit of lace work, what a distant look on that face of hers sticking arrogantly out of her high stiff collar.

Pity, I was too close to shoot, like a fencing in photography you cannot do corps to corps.

Every day I am going back to the same place hoping to get that pix again, I still have 4 more days in HK...” (HK001, film 426)

In film 429 he still notes, writes of how he returned to the same place in the following days, photographing other people on the ferry, but always waiting for that girl and the soldiers to come back to recreate the missing photo in front of him.

Beijing, 1948

It's almost tender to read these notes, because despite his enormous mastery and greatness, he pursues a thought that is naive and illusory, because reality never repeats itself twice.

What is past is forever.

The man who jumps on the puddle behind the Saint-Lazare station in 1932 will never again jump on the same puddle, and even if it happens absurdly, he will never do it the same way.

This is why it is one of his most famous photos, because it is the decisive moment like no one else could take it.

Yes, it is tender to read those notes on the roll and imagine his disappointed face waiting on the ferry, day after day, for the recurrence of a lost moment of beauty.

However, it was not lost at all, because Cartier-Bresson wrote down everything, describes every little detail, of the clothes and poses, even if compressed in the crowd, we also imagine jostled, without even the possibility of putting the Leica on the eyes.

Because what does the teacher do:

        “I am a visual man,
        I watch, watch, watch.
        I understand things through my eyes.”

So let's grant him that he missed a photo. We leave that rectangle blank and white. But well defined and detailed in his words, which become harpooned claws with all their strength to the flesh of reality that runs away.

Let that emptiness be the mirror that reflects, completes and explains the immeasurable visual, sociological and emotional heritage that it has left us.

Because even in failure the French photographer taught us what a photographer should do: observe, remember, draw.

Fill in the gaps (of meaning) that are all our hypothetical photographs just before they are taken.

 

But certainly not that of hoping that for a moment it will return to itself, as in the theater, where every scene is repeated the same – apparently – every evening, to the delight of our eyes.

That is impossible.

Also for Cartier-Bresson.

        “As soon as a photograph is taken,
        enter the past and it is life ...”
        (Henri Cartier-Bresson)

Saint Lazare, 1932

READ ALSO:

• Rhymes and Assonances: Two Photographers At the Mirror
• Archeology of A Passion 
  

Henri Cartier-Bresson: “In China” (Contrasto, 2019)
Henri Cartier-Bresson: “The Exhibition” (Contrasto \ Center Pompidou, 2015)
“Cartier-Bresson – Pictures and words” (Contrasto, 2015)
Clément Chéroux: “Henri Cartier-Bresson. The gaze of the century” (Contrasto, 2017)

Italian version