Sadanand Menon: Master of the Decisive Moment

CRITICALLY INCLINED

No artist/journalist in living memory epitomises the camera’s extraordinary affinity to the gun in its ability to draw-and-shoot and ‘hunt’ reality, as the late Henri Cartier-Bresson. The work of the French master photographer, whose ‘centenary year’ was launched a few weeks ago with a unique exhibition at the Chicago Art Institute, illustrates that genre of photography now famous as ‘the decisive moment’, drawing attention to the legendary instantaneity of his photographic method.

The Chicago exhibition has been specially curated by David Travis, to foreground Bresson’s sensibility for visual blocking and formal composition, which stemmed directly from his closeness to the works of artists and painters of the period like Picasso, de Chirico, Dali, Mondrian and his own guru Andre Lhote. But there was nothing ‘studied’ about Cartier-Bresson’s work. He believed in the accidental and the chancy moment and has been quoted as saying, “When you are photographing, there’s nothing that you’d call thinking going on.”

The leading ideologue of the Surrealist movement, André Breton — of whom Cartier-Bresson took a great portrait — wrote about his “ultra-receptive posture” to people and events, “as if he wants to help chance along; how should I say, to put himself in a state of grace with chance, so that something might happen.”

By the time Cartier-Bresson passed away (on August 2, 2004, three weeks short of his 96th birthday), he had not been taking photographs for over 30 years — and had, in fact, made several disparaging remarks about photography. Yet his aura and mystique as the ‘master of the moment’ continued.

Around 1976, he had returned to his original love, painting and drawing, assiduously learned from André Lhote, his cubist and surrealist teacher. His sketches and drawings in pencil, charcoal and India ink provide an insight to his graphic sensitivity for the contesting line, plane and texture in the same frame. Transferred on to a photograph, it performs a ‘pure’ act by remaining alert to the possibility of ‘order’ amidst the constant confusion of the visual world.

Cartier-Bresson (born August 22, 1908) quickly became famous as the hunter of the ‘instant’ and it was the 1952 American edition of his book ‘Image a la Sauvette’ (an image taken secretly, without permission), which was titled the ‘Decisive Moment’, an expression originally attributed to 17th Century French writer, Cardinal Retz. Though it was not a catch-phrase Cartier-Bresson himself coined, it stuck to all future descriptions of his photographic method.

He often described his picture-taking method, employing the imagery of a hunter or a fisher. He used to say, “When photographing, one is alas, always an intruder,” referring to the camera’s invasive properties and its implication in the regimes of spying and surveillance — which have become so problematic in recent times. He said, “Approach the subject on tiptoe… Let your steps be velvet but your eyes keen. A good fisherman does not stir up the water before he starts to fish.” Explaining why he never went into the darkroom to process his films — leaving it in the masterly hands of the equally legendary Pierre Gassman — he used to say: “I’m only a hunter, not a cook.”

Elsewhere he wrote: “We photographers are people who supply information to a world in haste and swamped willy-nilly in a morass of printed matter. This abbreviation of statement, which is the language of photography, is very potent; we express in effect a judgment of what we see and this demands intellectual honesty. We work in terms of reality, not of fiction, and must therefore ‘discover’ and not ‘fabricate’.”

Ironically, Cartier-Bresson’s funeral in a little village close to Avignon, in the South of France, was kept ‘camera-free’ and no-one took a picture, in deference to his lifelong wish for visual anonymity. He studiously avoided being photographed himself and went to great lengths to prevent his own image appearing anywhere.

I belong to that minuscule international fraternity of people who were permitted to photograph the photographer. One felt very brash, asking permission to photograph him. But then, I thought, it is not just history one needs to record; sometimes one needs to record the historian too.

Cartier-Bresson’s work with the camera provides identity to the middle decades of the twentieth century. However, for many of us, bang inside a new universe of digital manipulation which is reinventing the meaning of ‘photography’, what will ring true is his impassioned, inspirational artistic voice: “To take photographs is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge in the face of fleeting reality… It means to recognise, simultaneously and within the fraction of a second, both the fact itself and the rigorous organisation of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one’s head, one’s eye and one’s heart on the same axis. It is a way of life.”