<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > legendary Bresson</h1>
In the history of photography, Henri Cartier-Bresson is a legend, but also an inextricable name, and his works and artistic ideas have influenced countless photographers, so that people often overlook his other title: "Eye of the Century". He has traveled the world throughout his life, with vision and work throughout the 20th century. His lens focuses not only on his personal photographic journey, but also on the historical process of the 20th century:
Suffering from "blackwater disease" during filming in Africa, he almost died in his hometown; as a special photojournalist, he traveled to China during the civil war to record the peaceful liberation of Peiping and the total collapse of the Nationalist government; he experienced gandhi's assassination and Gandhi's funeral; he photographed the moment of German occupation of Paris and the liberation of Paris; he was imprisoned by the Nazis for 35 months and escaped after three escapes; in 1954, as the first Western photographer, he was allowed to enter the Soviet Union a year after Stalin's death He has recorded portraits of Picasso, Matisse, Sartre, Camus, and even cultural and artistic figures such as Chanel and Marilyn Monroe...
To this end, twenty keywords specially excerpted from Bresson involve many aspects of Bresson's photographic thought, and it is the reason why Bresson created the conceptual foundation of "legend":
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Decisive moment
I came across a quote from Cardinal Retz's memoirs, in which he wrote, "Everything in the world has its decisive moment." I used this sentence as an inscription in the French version. As we considered the title of the American edition, the possible proposal was a full page. Suddenly, Dick Simon said, "Why not use 'decisive moments'?" "Everybody hit it off. So I became, how to say, a plagiarist.
——Excerpt from "Like Born of the Heart"
Behind Saint-Lazare Train Station, Paris, France, 1932
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Magnum
I think creative work needs to communicate with people. So it's very inspiring to join a big family-like group knowing you're not alone... In Magnum, no one can decide what others should do...
The role of Magnum Pictures is fundamental because it means that when we as photographers may be thousands of miles away, there is a person who can represent our thoughts.
In Magnum, everyone enjoys complete freedom: no dogma, no small circles, only something that holds us all together, and I know exactly what that is; perhaps a certain impression of freedom and respect for reality.
——From "Conversation"
▲ 47th Street, Magnum Conference, 1959, from left: Mark Lübb, Michel Chevalier, Sam Holmes, Bresson, Photo: René Brie
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What photography is
For me, there is only one thing that matters, and that is the moment and the eternal. Eternity, like the horizon, stretches infinitely. Because it's hard for me to talk about the past, because I'm no longer the person I used to be. Everything I want to say is in my pictures, my pictures are my memories, my personal diaries.
For me, photography is also a kind of painting, which is the best photography, but it also contains an eternal struggle against time: you watch things disappear, everything is fleeting, when I photograph a girl, I can't say "smile again"... Because it's over.
——Excerpt from "Photography is Nothing, Looking is Everything"
Seville, Spain, 1933
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Why photography
In addition to being related to my interest in painting in terms of styling, photography is a way for me to keep a diary. I record what I do with photography, and I can take pictures at any time. I'm just a witness to the things that catch my eye...
Prostitute, Guatemus Street, Mexico, 1934
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Photography as a profession
My father, who in 1932 was not at all proud of being a photographer, was reluctant to even tell his friends about it.
Photography fulfilled my inner thirst for adventure and it was a real profession.
▲ Hyères, France, 1932
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methodology
Photographs are born in the here and now. We have neither the right to manipulate nor the right to cheat. We must constantly fight against time: what disappears is gone forever. The point is to grasp the moment, a fleeting action, a smile that is impossible to reproduce.
We should think before or after shooting, and never think while shooting. Our success depends on vitality, on a sober mind, on knowledge. Once we deliberately design a photo, it immediately falls into clichés.
——Excerpt from "Seize Life"
▲ Pierre and Paul Fortress, Leningrad, Russia, Soviet Union, 1973
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watch
The difference between a good film and a mediocre film is minimal, just a fraction of a centimeter. But the difference is a thousand miles. I don't think there's a big difference between the photos, but maybe it's this small difference that makes the difference decisive.
The film is not a way of publicity, but a way of calling out your experience. We can distinguish between leaflets and novels, because novels have to go through neural channels in the brain, and through imagination, they have more power than leaflets that are thrown into the trash at a glance.
Two young women waiting for the tram, Moscow, SOVIET Union, 1954
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Do not crop photos
I myself never crop a photo when I zoom in. It's like a movie with a soundtrack, or a pretty girl with a full nose, and after doing so, she can't "hang" on her face. Composition, shooting at the time of shooting, this is the only truth, and the same is true for journalists.
——From "A Journalist"
Brussels, Belgium, 1932
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Refused to be photographed
It's not about privacy, strategy, grandstanding, or anything else! You should go unnoticed and be invisible at all costs. The fact of being watched can change the way we think about others.
People don't understand this because we live in a world where we want to be famous. Isn't this obsessive-compulsive obsession of always "how am I" and "me, me, me"? They all do it with all their heart. To leave a trail? Too vain! It's unreal!
Bresson in his later years, 1973
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Leica
...... It could be a passionate deep kiss, a pistol shot, or a psychoanalyst's recliner. Leica can do anything...
▲ Selfie, Paris, 1932
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surrealism
What profoundly affected me was not surrealist painting, but Breton's thought. Around 1926-1927, although I was young and not a member of the Surrealist group, I regularly attended the "White Square Café". I really liked Breton's surrealist theory, about "bursting" and the role of intuition, especially the attitude of defiance.
Things and the world are extremely important to me. The Surrealists look like amateurs, but they are by no means, they are rebels.
—— From "The Eternal Game"
▲ Polis Karlov
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Liberals
I am an absolute liberal, an absolute liberal at all, that is, I am against all rights; but as a well-known photographer, there is also some form of right.
Giacometti, Paris, 1961
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Photography & Painting
Photography is an instant act; painting is a retreat. In photography, the key is a spontaneous impulse of constant visual attention that captures the moment and makes it eternal. In painting, images construct what our consciousness can grasp from the moment. That is to say, when we paint, what we have is time, and when we take pictures, we don't.
▲ Henri Cartier-Bresson's painting My Landlord and Her Husband, 1928
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Photography & Film
In my opinion, film has nothing to do with photography. Photography is a visual thing that can only be seen through the lens, like a sketch, a lithograph. Movies are like a speech, people never see a photograph, but a series of moving images. It's completely different.
——From "The Most Important Thing - Vision"
▲ Unsigned cinematographer, on location of Jean Renoir's film The Rules of the Game, 1939. (The one who turned his head was Henri Cartier-Bresson.) ）
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Black & White & Color
I like the photo to be black and white because it has a shift, a certain abstraction and great emotional power. Obviously, there are colors, but this is not my world at all... Color is always a little more pleasing, but there is no abstract power of black and white... Color itself is not beautiful.
Beauty is a relationship, nothing exists independently. Things always exist relative to other things. A red color is beautiful, and that is relative to brown or white. It's all about relationships. Warm colors, cool colors, there are some colors, the inherent laws of physics.
▲ Newly recruited Kuomintang soldiers, Forbidden City in Beiping, China, December 1948
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Content & Format
For me, content cannot exist independently of form. What I call form refers to some kind of precise modeling structure through which our concepts and emotions become concrete and perceptible. In photography, this visual structure can only be the result of a spontaneous sense of the rhythm of the model.
Alberto Giacometti at the Mag Gallery, Paris, France, 1961
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Image & Text
Exhibition photos do not need to speak, as long as there is a title, and our photography has captions. This "annotation" is not exactly explanatory text, no, it is more like some kind of context of the image, outlining the outline of the image ... The instructions are written by ourselves, in order to ensure the consistency of the picture and text. We write captions for images instead of images.
The Woman Weeping on the Ruins, 1945
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Pose vs. Snap
Life is like an operating table: everything is concentrated here, and what we find here is always richer than we think. All the exposed photographs, those posed, without a little formal and dialectical significance, are the remnants of those fashions and advertisements... What else do I know? The aspects of these authors that interest me are sociological and political, because they represent the festering and disorder of a certain American world—a world that leads to nothingness.
Unfortunately, they are not revolutionary at all, but are instead complicit in the same society as this hypermarket. They are like a world without sex, without carnal desires, without love. They spew feces all over their mouths to photograph their anxiety and neuroticism.
We have to imitate, and we are all imitators, but what we should imitate is nature—we portray ourselves in the second release.
—— From "No One Can Come In Except a Geometrist"
Coronation of George VI, Trafalgar Square, London, England, 12 May 1937
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Photography & Religion
Follow a rule, discipline yourself strictly and forget yourself completely. The same should be true of photography: contemplation, without trying to prove what it is. I feel the same way about freedom: a framework that embraces all change. Obviously, this is the root of Zen Buddhism: we are born with great power and will eventually forget ourselves.
Mattis, France, 1944
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Present, future
This informational world is closed to me, it is self-enclosed, it is a world of self-destruction. You see some photographers now, they're thinking, they're looking, they want, we feel in them the neurosis of our time... But I couldn't feel the visual joy in them. Sometimes, what we feel is the anxiety and pathology of a suicidal world...