Images of Other Times

Photographs by Atget and Cartier-Bresson

Figure 1. Mucha, Musée Carnavalet, Paris

I went to the Musée Carnavalet for the third time since it reopened a few months ago. This time with a group of press people and a guide. It was nice to have a guide. It is a big museum and one tends to get lost or side tracked. So, if the possibility presents itself when you are at the museum, I encourage you to get a guide. Happily, I (finally) saw some displays that I hadn’t seen (found) since the reopening, specifically the gorgeous Bijouterie Fouquet designed by Mucha (Figure 1) and the bed/room of Proust, with lively visuals, (no not that kind). (Figure 2) Did you know that Proust only wrote in bed. It gives me courage to go on!

Figure 2. Proust’s Bedroom, Musée Carnavalet, Paris

As we walked through one of the 19th century rooms, a few photographs of chiffoniers, (rag and bone men), caught my eye. And I thought back to the three photographic exhibitions I saw this past summer that document a century of change in Paris, from the late 19th century through the end of the century that preceded the one we are currently enduring.

The first exhibition was of photographs by Eugene Atget (1857-1927) at the Fondation Cartier-Bresson. (Figure 3) Atget’s was a rough and tumble life. He began as a sailor, turned to painting, then to acting before finally becoming a photographer. But not in the traditional sense of earning a living by taking studio photographs of the newly born, the newly married or the newly deceased or in the artsy Man Ray sense of fine art or magazine advertisements.

Figure 3. Eugène Atget. Voir Paris, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, 2021

Atget started out photographing objects he thought painters, architects and stage designers might find useful. (Figure 4) Then he started documenting life in Paris. Not the lives of the rich and famous, but those of the ‘petit ouvriers’ the workers whose often back-breaking manual jobs were being lost to one thing or another. Like the chiffoniers (Figure 5) whose livelihoods were disappearing because of the introduction of public trash bins instituted by Préfet Eugène Poubelle. Whose name now means garbage can.

Figure 4. Eugène Atget, Documents pour artists, 1890+

I saw a disturbing piece about garbage the other day on the television. The ugly truth is that garbage, in the form of ‘stuff' hasn't gone away. It’s just being offshored. It’s collected, put on huge ships and sent to poor countries. People in those countries used to be able to repair the ‘stuff’ and then resell most of it. (Did you know that's how the Marché aux Puces got started, I'll tell you about that soon) But now the quality of what's on those huge ships is so low, that’s no longer possible. The stuff goes directly to landfills and lasts forever, well if not forever, for too long.

Garbage seems to be on lots of peoples' minds lately. I was walking through the Place des Vosges the other day and happened upon a temporary outdoor exhibition by the Brazilian artist Vik Muniz called "Pictures of Garbage.” He had gone to Jardim Gramacho, a massive landfill outside Rio de Janeiro to find material and subjects for his own work. Muniz incorporates well known paintings, like J.L. David’s Death of Marat (Figure 6) with his own, made of garbage from this landfill with the pickers who work there as models. (Figure 7) There are about six Muniz works at the Place des Vosges, one more artist's cry against our disposable world and the destruction of our planet.

Figure 6. Death of Marat,, Jacques Louis David

Figure 7. 'Marat (Sebastião)’ Vik Muniz, 2008

In the Atget show, there is a photo of a woman, a bouquetière, selling dried flowers. (Figure 8) How many flowers would you have to sell to afford heating oil? Then there are photos of signs, painted on buildings, not on billboards. One I especially liked is an advertisement for voitures à bras, hand held wheelbarrows. For city dwellers, not country folk, to move furniture from one lodging to another rather than compost or rocks from one plot of land to another. (Figure 9)

Figure 9. Location de Voitures a Bras, Eugène Atget

Atget has been called a flaneur. But I am not convinced that is an accurate label. A flaneur is a man who leisurely strolls around the city noticing everything but going unnoticed. He walks for pleasure. For Atget, walking around Paris was a job. He was documenting a way of life as it was disappearing. Atget offered his collections of photographs to institutions like the Musée Carnavalet.The museum began collecting Atget’s photos in 1898 with a set Atget called, Paris PIttoresque. In the early 1900s, the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris commissioned him to systematically photograph old buildings in Paris. (Figure 10)

Figure 10. Hotel de Marquis de Chantosme, 6 rue de Tournon, Eugène Atget

There's an American connection. The American photographer, Berenice Abbot, (Figure 11) who was in Paris working with Man Ray in the 1920s, became besotted with Atget’s work. She went to his studio to photograph him in 1927. (Figure 12) When she returned to show him the portrait, he was already dead. She acquired 1500 glass plate negatives and 8000 original prints of his, which she shipped to the United States and eventually sold to MoMA. It was the inspiration for her life’s work, documenting the architectural landscape of New York City. (Figure 13)

Figure 11. Berenice Abbot, self portrait

Figure 12. Portrait of Eugène Atget, Berenice Abbot

Figure 13. New York City, Berenice Abbot

While the Carnavalet’s Atget collection of Paris photographs was at the Fondation Cartier-Bresson, Cartier-Bresson’s photographs of Paris were on display at the Carnavalet. In the temporary exhibition space inaugurated by this exhibition. The two museums simply swapped collections for their first post-pandemic exhibitions.

The Carnavalet exhibition is entitled, ‘Henri Cartier-Bresson, Revoir Paris (Paris Revisited). (Figure 14). The exhibition unfolds chronologically as well as thematically. A note explains the black line border around some of the photos. The line represents the actual photograph C-B took. Not cropped, not edited. The full image. He insisted on the black border so the viewer would know that what you see is the photo he took. He didn’t manipulate the image after the fact. He didn’t even use flashbulbs. With very few exceptions, the photo worked or it didn’t. (Figure 15)

Figure 14. Henri Cartier-Bresson Revoir Paris, Musée Carnavalet, 2021

Figure 15. Cartier-Bresson, self portrait, 1957

C-B was born in 1904 into a wealthy family (on his father’s side, textile manufacturers, on his mother’s, cotton merchants) from whom he distanced himself when his sentiments became more pro-Communist but from whom he continued to accept an allowance. Which permitted him to worry less about money and more about art. Lucky fellow. Initially he studied painting with a Cubist painter. But then he became interested in photography, specifically the photography of the Surrealists. For a camera, he chose a lightweight Leica. Which he held all the time, except, he explained once, when he shaved.

C-B spoke of his photographs as sketches. Sketches maybe, but final products, too. A combination of chance and timing, as well as a preconceived notion of what the scene needed if it was going to work. And that preconceived notion was based upon geometry. That is, he would come upon a scene and see an assortment of permanent artifacts, like buildings, fences and statues and ephemeral ones, like a poster or a puddle. These needed only the arrival of the transitory, like a person, to be transformed into a photograph-worthy scene. He might have to wait a long time for everything to come together, but he had to be ready when it did. Wait, wait, wait, then hurry up. Snap the shot at exactly the right moment, or lose it altogether.

C-B’s photo of the man jumping over the puddle behind Paris’ Gare Saint-Lazare is exactly that combination of permanent, ephemeral and transitory. (Figure 16) The man leaping across the water echoes the movement of the dancers leaping on a poster on the wall behind him. The ripples in the puddle around the ladder mimic the curved metal pieces in the water nearby. With that man’s puddle hop, C-B saw all the components come together and clicked the shutter.

Figure 16. Behind Gare St. Lazare, Cartier-Bresson, 1932

The image is the quintessential example of C-B’s “Decisive Moment.” His lyrical term for immortalizing a fleeting moment of time, for all time. According to one critic, C-B’s style was fast, mobile and detail-obsessed. His images, masterpieces of form and light.

Another photo is called, ‘Sunday On the Banks of the Marne’. ((Figure 17) As I look at the photograph, I see C-B, with the strap of his little Leica dangling from his finger, walking along a gravel path, pausing here and there to size up the picnickers and sunbathers. To see if there was a photo possibility there. These two couples have definitely not wandered out of an Impressionist painting. They have more in common with the people who populate the paintings of the American artists working at the beginning of the 20th century, the Ashcan School. (Figure 18) Those painters depicted the boisterous folks who crowded into New York City’s Central Park and Coney Island on weekend afternoons. Mostly poor, often immigrants, escaping the sweltering heat of their airless apartments.

Figure 17. Sunday On the Banks of the Marne, Cartier-Bresson, 1936-38

Figure 18. River Front, George Bellows, Ashcan School

C-B’s foursome enjoy a respite from their jobs, and probably from their tiny walk up flats, too. Interesting fact: the year 1938, the year this photograph was taken, was the first year that workers in France were awarded an annual paid vacation. It is hard to imagine that the month between July 14 and August 15, considered by Frenchmen and women as their vacation birthright has only been a ‘right’ for a little over 80 years!

C-B received commissions too, for portraits of famous people. Like Ezra Pound, Colette and Matisse. (Figures 19, 20, 21). They didn't pose, there were no props. C-B would sit with them and as unobtrusively as possible, take a few photos and that was that. Another photograph, this one of Alberto Giacometti, one of several he took of the sculptor, is quite unlike his standard portraits of famous people. Giacometti is walking across the street in the rain, his coat over his head, trying to stay dry. It is a Decisive Moment photograph rather than a famous person portrait. (Figure 22)

Figure 22. Alberto Giacometti in the Rain, Cartier-Bresson, 1961

C-B traveled the world as a photo-journalist for French and foreign publications. He photographed Gandhi an hour before he was assassinated and then stayed to cover the funeral. When C-B was in Paris, his photographs documented moments of public significance there, too. Like the crowds who gathered for the Liberation of Paris in 1944 and those who witnessed the end of the Fourth Republic in 1952. He documented the demonstration in Paris of October 17, 1961. A massacre of probably hundreds of Algerian demonstrators protesting the Algerian War, beaten to death by the police or thrown into the Seine to drown. The following year he documented the funerals of the Charonne metro victims of police brutality (Figure 23). And he was there to record the student revolts of May, 1968. (Figure 24)`

Figure 23. Funerals of the Charonne Metro Victims, Cartier-Bresson, 1962

Figure 24. Student Demonstrations, May 1968, Cartier-Bresson, 1968

C-B stopped taking photographs in 1968. He was ready to move on, or more accurately, move back, to the pencil and the brush which he had abandoned years earlier. He was tired of waiting hours for the right moment to take a shot. What he wanted to do was look out his window at the same scene for as long as he wished, drawing or painting it as many times as he chose.

Of course nobody knew that at 64 he still had a 1/3 of his life yet to live. By his mid-60s, he had been a photographer for half of his life. That he would live another 30 years, who could have predicted. But none of us know our expiry date, maybe we can learn from C-B’s example that it is never to late to follow or retrieve our passion.

The third photography exhibition and the second C-B exhibition was at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (BnF). It was called ‘Le Grand Jeu’ (the Great Game). (Figure 25). Here’s the background.

Figure 25. Henri Cartier-Bresson, Le Grand Jeu, BnF, 2021

In 1973, the art collectors, Dominique and John de Ménil, friends of C-B, suggested that he select, from amongst the thousands of photographs he had taken, his favorite 365 to become his ‘Master Collection’. C-B eventually selected 385 and his favorite printer made 5 copies of the set. Which he gave to various cultural institutions, the Ménil Collection in Houston, the BnF in Paris, the V & A in London, the University of the Arts in Osaka. He kept a set for himself, now at the FCB. Most recently, the collector Francois Pinault obtained a 6th copy. How? I don’t know. Money can’t buy you health or happiness but it sure can buy you stuff.

So, what is this exhibition about, this Grand Jeu ? Briefly, five people were selected as co-curators, and each was asked to select 50 or so prints from the 385 in the Master Collection to create an exhibition. The title of the exhibition, ‘Le Grand Jeu’ reminds us of the idea of chance, so dear to the Surrealists and to which C-B was drawn as a young man. Each of the five exhibitions is independent. None of the co-curators knew what prints the others had selected. Each had complete liberty to display the photographs they selected as they wished. The scenography, the framing, the color of the picture rails, all these elements were left to the discretion of each curator.

The five co-curators were collector François Pinault, photographer Annie Leibovitz, author Javier Cercas, film director Wim Wenders and BnF Curator, Sylvie Aubenas. Each brought to the task his or her own particular sensibility. Each mini-exhibition begins with a curator’s statement, an explanation of what C-B’s photos meant to them. There was lots of overlap in the photographs selected. Which is understandable for the iconic photos that we all know even when we don’t know who took them. (Figure 26) Other photos, less iconic ones, also popped up over and over again. (Figure 27) The repetition in different contexts was very pleasing.

Figure 26. Rue Moufftard, Cartier-Bresson, 1954

Figure 27. Bougival, France, Cartier-Bresson, 1956

My two favorite co-curators were Annie Lebovitz and Wim Wenders. Somehow, their responses were more soulful, more heartfelt in a way, as they explained their selections and showed us how to look at C-B’s work through their eyes. Wim Wenders made a short film in which he looks at some of the photographs he has selected through a magnifying glass, and marvels at certain things, and we do, too.

Annie Lebovitz (Figure 28) explains how seeing C-B’s work as a young art student convinced her to become a photographer. She recounts a time when she contacted C-B to see if she could meet with him. She was coming to Paris and wanted to take his photograph. He didn’t respond. She tracked him down and waited outside his studio. When he finally appeared, she began taking his photo. He was furious. He explained that if his face became known, he wouldn’t be able to move around the city as freely, take candid photos as easily. People would see him and pose. It reminded me of Ruth Reichl, her wigs and disguises, her quest for anonymity as the restaurant critic of the New York Times.

Figure 28. Annie Leibovitz, Curator, Le Grand Jeu, BnF, 2021

C-B told another interviewer that he didn’t want to be photographed for being famous. But famous he became, if not for his own face then for all the faces of all the people he photographed at just the right moment. When just the right confluence of elements aligned and a photo of unmeasurable distinction and charm was produced by the genius who made the most of those Decisive Moments.

These exhibitions are over but catalogues documenting the exhibitions are filled with information and illustrations. Why not have a look.

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