It is a known fact that Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) hated being photographed. There are several images that show the photographer out of his mind, with his hand in front of his face, trying to hide at all costs. The director of the foundation dedicated to him, Clément Chéroux, mischievously admits having “we play with a taboo” deciding to punctuate with portraits of the photographer of all ages the retrospective dedicated to him in Landerneau (Finistère), in the Edouard and Hélène Leclerc Fund. He specifies: “Henri Cartier Bresson refused to be photographed since the fifties, and especially since the sixties, to remain anonymous and photograph more freely.. But he didn’t always resist. In the 1930s he even made self-portraits. »
For this first retrospective in Brittany, Clément Chéroux divided the work into twenty-three sections and presented each of them with a portrait of the artist, “to show that it is not always the same person who takes the photo. There were several Cartier-Bressons: the surrealist, the photojournalist, the observer of consumer society… It was important to embody him and see him age. »
And the kaleidoscopic exhibition idea works. The twenty-three portraits punctuate as many small thematic and chronological chapters with a refined scenography: surrealism, trips to the United States, reports in India or the USSR… In the profound retrospective presented at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 2014, When it was Director of the photography department, Clément Chéroux had tried to shed light on the photographer’s blind spots, accumulating unpublished material, letters and documents.
The “decisive moment”
For this exhibition in Brittany, he focused more classically on the work, with 300 period engravings, including all the icons, plus some little-known photographs. The curator had the good idea of associating several films, including The returnmade in 1945 by Cartier-Bresson, about prisoners and deportees returning home after the war. Another signed by Gjon Mili (1904-1984) completes the photographer’s portraits showing, something unusual, the modest Cartier-Bresson in full action, in 1956: agile and light, rotating around the subject.
Each mini-chapter exposes, if necessary, the photographer’s astonishing virtuosity. The first three, dedicated to the beginning of his career influenced by his painting studies and surrealism, establish his style, the famous “decisive moment”, a synthesis of rigor and intuition. “From the beginning, what is extraordinary about it is the association of something very controlled, geometric and something very free.says Clément Chéroux. He says he doesn’t calculate: his unconscious has recognized something and presses the button. »
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