The Man, The Image & The World

“As far as I am concerned, taking photographs is a means of understanding, which cannot be separated from other means of visual expression. It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one’s originality. It is a way of life.” –Henri Cartier-Bresson

Susan Sontag stated that ‘to collect photography is to collect the world’, and few would have such a rich collection of powerful photographic stories from each corner of the globe than Henri Cartier-Bresson. Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Man, The Image & The World, a major exhibition of photographs selected by Bresson, debuted at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, in 2003, and was the last exhibition that he was involved with before his death in August 2004. The exhibition explores his documentary film-making, portraits, photographic assignments, and his skill for capturing ‘the decisive moment’, creating a fusion between photo-journalism and art.

Bresson’s photographs, while including landscapes and cityscapes, are predominantly of people, capturing the myriad of human emotions and human needs. The photographs have been taken throughout different periods and in different places – France, Italy, America, USSR – however, while the cultural, religious and even personal differences have been captured, there is also an overwhelming sense of similarity, as if Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ gave him a sixth sense of capturing a moment when the human condition was mirrored, through his lens, across the world.

Some of the most poignant works are his photographs of America, reflecting an almost tangible feeling of loneliness and disconnection in cities so full of people.

While Bresson’s craft as a photojournalist enabled him to record defining moments in history – the fall of the Kuomintang in China, Gandhi’s assassination in India – he also photographed portraits of his contemporaries: Matisse, Faulkner, Sartre, Ernst, Picasso and Capote, among others. These images are intimate snapshots of not only a moment, but an attitude, allowing a hint at the personality behind the person through the curl of a lip, a faraway gaze or a hand gesture captured in time.

It is these portraits that may inspire us to ask, did Henri Cartier-Bresson choose the ‘decisive moment’, or did the decisive moment choose him?

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Man, The Image & The World
Queensland Art Gallery
August 27 – November 27