Photography on the Run

John Haber
in New York City

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Decisive Moment

Elliott Erwitt in Pittsburgh

So even "the decisive moment" was a fudge. The phrase has come to embody not just the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, but the very aim of photography before and since. It made the 1952 book of that title, in the words of Robert Capa, "a Bible for photographers." Yet Cartier-Bresson may never have intended it.

The book appeared in France, with Tériade publishers, as Images à la Sauvette—images on the run or on the sly. Surely, it announces, he was just taking his chances and just passing through. So, too, were his subjects, from a refugee camp in India to prostitutes in Mexico and drifters in Marseilles. Only in its English-language edition, with Simon & Schuster, did it become The Decisive Moment. Never mind, though, for it has never looked more decisive. The International Center of Photography looks at it in depth, along with views of Pittsburgh from just two years before by Elliott Erwitt that trade in much the same ideals and disbelief.

Looking out and looking back

Henri Cartier-Bresson may never have intended it, at least at first, but he hardly denied it. It was still his book, of one hundred twenty-six images from Europe, Asia, and the Americas. It summed up more than twenty years of work by a photographer, born in 1908, who could claim in time to have captured or even defined the century. It could boast a cover by Henri Matisse—and a portrait of Matisse painting a woman more clothed than you might ever expect. It appeared at a decisive moment, as the Depression was giving way to the baby boom, World War II to the Cold War, and empires to new crises in Asia, and it encompassed them all. If this was photography on the run, it ran wide and deep.

Besides, his American editor, Dick Simon, was relying on him. Il n'y a rien dans ce monde, Cartier-Bresson wrote (quoting an eighteenth-century French cardinal), "qui n'ait un moment décisif: "there is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment." For photography, he continued awkwardly but carefully, that requires "simultaneous recognition in a fraction of a second of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms that give that event its proper significance." The curator, Agnès Sire of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson with ICP's Susan Carlson, wants to set thing straight, but then that means truth to the photographer and his moment. What could be more decisive?

Cartier-Bresson had his way of making any moment decisive. He had his way, too, of making a moment last. He could freeze his subjects forever, like a man leaping over a puddle behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Parisians enjoying Sunday excess by the banks of the Seine, a man sharing his Lower Manhattan alley with a squirrel, a groom pushing his bride on a swing, or a big hot kiss. The ephemeral and the permanent may depend on one another for their sheer existence, much as cyclists barrel past a cluster of empty desks. They seem all the more decisive because one cannot explain what they are doing there, no more than the desks. Someone else had to decide, and that someone is already gone.

They may be contested moments, but never irrecoverably. Dust all but buries the refugee camp, smog the Forbidden City, and lingering flames the ruins of Hoboken after a fire, but they offer the comfort of their soft glow. A woman confronts a Nazi collaborator in 1945, but one wants desperately to believe that the moment brings reconciliation and justice. One has to believe, too, that the photographer is not the sole witness. Others look on eagerly, just as at a coronation at Westminster and an air show in Siena, because politics here is never far from a human spectacle—nor a spectacle from politics and humanity. To judge by a poster, Last Days of Kuomintang, it may be already a movie.

Like many a movie, it often has a subplot. Jean-Paul Sartre on a bridge would be nothing without his look askance, his pipe, and the companion facing him down, but also the silhouettes in the distance and the dome that marks his location as, of course, the Left Bank. A man on Boston Common, head bent, would be nothing without his suit and the heat weighing him down, but also the others around him better able to enjoy a rest. The shocks link Surrealism to photojournalism, and no photographer has done more to elude any one genre—or to encompass them all. The shocks led him to found Magnum Photos with Capa and to invite Bruce Davidson to join them. They also anticipate street photography in the hands of Joel Meyerowitz, Garry Winogrand, and Diane Arbus.

They were decisive for photography ever since. Teju Cole is still in search of what matters when he limns his photos with the false profundities of his text. Geoff Dyer, in turn, is still responding when he seeks instead the unresolved—in his words, the "ongoing moment," much like what museums have called "Time Management Techniques" and the "extended moment." Yet Cartier-Bresson anticipated their praise and their objections all along, and he rejected them as well. For Dyer, photography's ultimate subject is the unwitting subject, like a blind woman for Paul Strand. Walker Evans, he notes, hid his camera under his coat. Not Cartier-Bresson, for whom prostitutes with crossed arms in the portholes of a doorway are always looking out and looking back.

The decisive fiction

He made a career of rejecting claims for him. The rejections may seem half hearted, like his original title, but they, too, are telling. He rejected photojournalism as a label, even as he made it possible. Les images de ce livre, he declared, ne prétendent pas donner une idée genérale de l'aspect de tel ou tel pays: "the images of this book do not pretend to give a general idea of the face of this or that country." But then they do.

Still, they can do so only because they reject the general in favor of particulars—particular nations, moments, and people. One remembers just that. It could be a woman sure enough of being alone to throw her head back on one of many benches in Hyde Park. It could be a banker's overbearing stride or a fat man's seeming to burst through a wall. Does that make them complicit or apart? Does it make them actors or subjects? Does it make them decisive?

Yes and no, for it comes down to who gets to decide, and for Cartier-Bresson that may be the truest subject of all. It is implicit in the juxtapositions and the politics, but also in the unknowns. He pairs a mother's anguish with her daughter's hope and relief—but are they looking off at something terrifying or joyful? Are they looking, for that matter, at the same thing? One thing for sure: it is not the same as what he is seeing or you.

He is never just sardonic or exploitative, but also never in awe. He is too empathetic and, as a photographer, too involved. He would never place his sitter in a tight corner like Irving Penn or his living room like Peter Hujar, but also never fully above the crowd. He is neither making people into a fashion statement like Richard Avedon, sharing their pride and pain like Robert Mapplethorpe and Mapplethorpe portraits, or rushing past like Lee Friedlander in "America by Car." He is an insider among the artists and writers in his portraits, but also an outsider among the homeless. And he knows that even the most celebrated artists and writers may be outsiders, too.

The decisive moment is necessarily a fiction. Someone had to compose it, and someone had to make it a priority for photography. It differs decisively from the Victorian theater that served many as an ideal for early photography. It would not have been possible even for him without the hand-held Leica. Now he could travel the world, to the point that a 2010 MoMA retrospective opened with a map. It is real all the same, and ICP adds insight in going by the book.

Cartier-Bresson was in India for the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. He shows Jawaharlal Nehru summoning up by lamplight the response of a statesman. He shows, too, a man breaking away from a wave of mourners to reach for the viewer and the sky. Which of the three events was the decisive moment? Maybe all of them, for each in its way changed history—as epic making, as restoring order, or as finding common ground in emotion. History and photography have many shapers, and each has to decide.

City of bridges

Elliott Erwitt was just twenty-two when Roy Stryker invited him to Pittsburgh. They were out to "capture [its] transformation," as Claartje van Dijk of the International Center of Photography puts it, "from an industrial city into a modern metropolis." Erwitt embraced the theme, and why not? This was not yet Donald J. Trump's America, turning its back on that very future, and Stryker continued in the tradition of public projects since Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and the Great Depression. He had served as director of photography for the Farm Security Administration and had funding from Standard Oil. Besides, Erwitt was in transformation, too.

He was just one of twelve contributors in 1950 to the Pittsburgh Photographic Library, but he had met Robert Capa, the arch-deacon of documentary photography at Magnum Photos, and he came on recommendation of Edward Steichen himself. Pittsburgh was new to him, but he had been working on similar territory not that far away, in the refineries of New Jersey. The Korean War and the draft cut the work short after just four months, but Erwitt hardly minded the break, and he left his negatives behind with all the carelessness and optimism of youth. Now ICP recovers just under forty prints, from thousands of frames in black and white. They move easily between public occasions and day-to-day activities—and between infrastructure and people. He worked fast and was more than comfortable with change.

He could have made a point of contrasting coarse industry with a vital center city, but no. He prefers markers of transition itself, like a demolition project and a refitted marquee, a bus station and a boy momentarily trapped in a car. Shop windows announce poultry for sale and the day's specials, for those, too, have a limited shelf life. His formal instinct itself points to impermanence. He closes in on a bridge in the "city of bridges," for what approaches abstraction. Yet it is still a crossing.

Erwitt shares the museum's first floor with its look back at Cartier-Bresson and publication of The Decisive Moment in 1952. For him, though, the decisive moment meant not an uncanny perfection, but a moment in time. It could be a comic moment at that, and he did not hesitate to deflate its pretensions. Later in life he played on Cartier-Bresson's image of a man leaping across a puddle in Paris, but the man's umbrella brings him closer to Charlie Chaplin—and a couple struggles with a broken umbrella nearby. Change and imperfection for Erwitt also turn on unresolved divisions, in a city whose bridges run between wealth and poverty. The show pairs church ladies and show girls, children and stockings hung like the remnants of a lynching.

He has way too much humor and sympathy to turn that into a lecture. A black kid grins while holding a toy gun to his head. He may not make it to adulthood, but he would be the last to complain. He has internalized both the game and the freak show, like the boy with a toy grenade for Diane Arbus. The most seemingly orchestrated moment has its dark humor as well. All heads turn at once, looking up and to the side, and all are wearing much the same coat and hat.

Erwitt does not care for conformity, but he leaves open just what they are watching, and he knows that he and the viewer now are watching, too. He is not alone in the self-reflective territory of people watching. (ICP also commemorates a series by Paul Fusco of people lining the rails for Robert F. Kennedy's funeral train—where Rein Jelle Terpstra has rounded up snapshots and home movies from less artful spectators as well.) Yet he is drawn to witnesses, like celebrants on Armistice Day, priests looking down on the city, and (later in life) museum-goers. Take it from him that the men in hats were watching a football game, in the days before kneeling athletes and raucous drinking. They may not be capable of smiling, even if one could see their faces, but they are caught up in the moment, and that moment will soon be gone.

jhaber@haberarts.com

"Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Decisive Moment" and Elliott Erwitt ran at the International Center of Photography through September 2, 2018. Do excuse me if I start afresh here after my earlier review if a Cartier-Bresson retrospective, which I invite you to read. A related review looks at Magnum Photos.