Cartier-Bresson and Me: Part 7, Conclusion
Cartier-Bresson and Me: Part 7
MOMA and Beyond
With all this personal history long behind me in May, 2010, I traveled to New York City to see a huge retrospective of Cartier-Bresson’s work at the Museum of Modern Art. Although I had ceased being a photographer almost 20 years prior, the chance to see the the master’s work again was irresistible. The show was called “The Modern Century.”
With few exceptions all the prints were the approximately same size, averaging roughly 24 cm x 36 cm (9.5 in x 14 in). [The proportions of Cartier-Bresson photos nearly always follow the proportions of the original exposure (1x1.5), since cropping violated his principle that the golden ratio of the frame markers were the given boundaries of the composition.] Unfortunately, this imposed a crushing sameness, with masterpieces lumped together with the merely reportorial; none of the images were allowed to express their grandeur with large-scale prints.
A second limitation: the tonality of the prints. Granted, Cartier-Bresson shunned the high contrast light and preferred low-contrast prints. But these prints were too often just plain muddy.
Many sections of the exhibit were accompanied by glass-topped cases situated directly beneath the photos hanging on the wall. The cases showed copies of Life Magazine and Paris Match, opened to the articles illustrated by his photographs. This had the advantage of demonstrating how his work appeared as photojournalism. Cartier-Bresson was a witness to history. Seeing these side-by-side, the prints and the pages where they appeared was a lesson in the key role Cartier-Bresson played in the evolution of photojournalism.
After viewing the entire sprawling exhibit I came away with a new perspective on my hero’s work. He was a pioneer but also a journeyman. Sometimes he elevated photojournalism to the level of fine art. Some of his images taken on assignment reached the level of durable art. And I could see the clear influence of his work in mine, sometimes in plain imitation. Take, for instance, his photo of sunbathers taken in 1955 on the banks of the Seine:
With my photo taken in the central park in Budapest in 1976:
As a young aspiring artist it is good to have gods, to venerate works of acknowledged masters and hold them up as ideals to be imitated or emulated. But as an old man, it is not advised to hold the masters to the standards of our youth.
[Start over with Part 1]
