When asked if, as he has repeatedly stated, he considers Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) to be “the eye of the 20th century” – referring to the fact that from 1930 to 1970 he photographed almost all the important monuments. events of this tumultuous era, including the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, life in Russia after the death of Stalin, Mao’s victory in China or the decolonization processes in Africa and Asia –, Urich Pohlmann, responds Yes.
But immediately, the curator of the monographic exhibition on the photographer, which bears the title Watch! Watch! Watch!says: “He photographed important politicians – for example, in Cuba he photographed Che Guevara and Fidel Castro – but I think these images are not the best. » “The best,” he continues, “are those of everyday life, like those of a woman standing before him in uniform or those of an older woman holding a rifle in her hand in front of a wedding window. »
It is with this in mind that Pohlmann selected the 240 silver gelatin copies that the Cartier-Bresson Foundation offered to the KBr Fundación Mapfre center, in Barcelona, to illustrate Watch! Watch! Watch! (in reference to the fact that Cartier-Bresson himself claimed that he only “looked, looked, looked”), an exhibition which can be visited until January 26, 2025. These are copies made from life of the author, for many. between the 60s and 80s, since Cartier-Bresson forbade making new copies of his negatives after his death.
Another example that the curator shows of how the legendary French photojournalist reflected the reality of the moment through ordinary people, far from the great protagonists of History but still influenced by them, are the images of the coronation of King George VI from England, where Cartier-Bresson fixes the camera on the waiting crowd, notably on an old woman who climbs on two men’s horses to get a better view.
Also, on the occasion of Gandhi’s cremation in India, Pohlmann highlights an image – located at the end of the entire series devoted to the burial with his successor Pandit Nehru in the foreground – on which we can see a child playing with ashes. “These are Gandhi’s ashes and the boy is his grandson,” the commissioner said, commenting on the allegory that no matter how great we are in life, we all end up in ashes.
The surreal years
Pohlmann recommends viewing the exhibition in order, as it is arranged chronologically, thus explaining both the author’s stylistic transitions and the events he described. He explains that Cartier-Bresson, although coming from a family of textile entrepreneurs from the Ile-de-France region, broke off the family business at the age of 18 and left to study painting in Montparnasse with André Lhote.
In Paris between the wars, he made contact with the artistic avant-garde and joined the surrealist movement. From this period, full of experimentation and ingenuity, was born his theory of the “decisive moment”, which is expressed with particular clarity in the famous photo taken behind the Saint-Lazare station, Place de l’Europe in Paris in 1932.
We see a man captured in the moment of jumping over a puddle, suspended in the air and with the reflection of his jump frozen on the surface of the puddle.
But after a trip to the Ivory Coast in 1930, Cartier-Bresson finally decided to devote himself to photography as a professional, devoting himself to the nascent photojournalism, which would be decisive in the following decades in reporting on the major events that shook the 20th century. His first assignment abroad was to Spain in 1933 to cover the elections won by the Popular Front.
The liberation of Paris
He depicts people’s lives at street level, with a distinctly social emphasis, leaving surrealist experimentation behind. Pohlmann emphasizes, however, that “he never stopped looking for an artistic component in his images that went beyond the message, just as would his contemporary Lee Miller, who led a parallel career until the end of the Second World War.”
But unlike Miller, who abandoned the profession in the post-war period, overwhelmed by alcoholism and the horrors she had to photograph during the war, “Cartier-Bresson continued for another 30 years and had a longer career with a broader professional perspective.” “, underlines the commissioner of Look, look, look“becoming the first Western photojournalist to describe life in Soviet Russia after the death of Stalin or the fall of Shanghai in 1949 to Mao Zedong.”
But before these famous works, the images of which are also present in the exhibition at the KBr center, Cartier-Bresson, as a communist sympathizer, was present in the Spanish Civil War in 1937, where he filmed the film Victory of Life. He later returned to Paris and joined the army.
In 1940, he was captured by the Nazis and entered a prison camp, from which he managed to escape in 1943 to immediately join the resistance, with whom he participated in the liberation of Paris. With his Leica 35mm compact camera in hand, he photographed the end of the German occupation, always looking at the people in the street and their way of suffering the vicissitudes of history.
But these images, also present in Watch! Watch! Watch! have their own story behind them. “Their existence was only known in 1969,” explains Pohlmann, “because they had been completely forgotten. » “He had kept them in a biscuit tin and it was towards the end of his professional career that he found them while organizing files,” says the commissioner. Some images are shocking in their harshness, such as those of the execution of female collaborationists.
The working classes seen by Cartier-Bresson
“A communist sympathizer in his youth, he always wanted to photograph the living conditions of the working classes wherever he was,” observes the curator, who adds that with this spirit Cartier-Bresson traveled throughout his native France, but also across Spain. , the United States – where in 1947 he participated in the creation of the Magnum agency with Robert Capa, David Seymour “Chim”, Maria Eisner and Rita Vandivert, among other legendary photographers -, post-revolutionary Cuba or the Russia of Khrushchev.
The photographs he took in Russia in the mid-fifties, at a time when no other Westerner could take portraits and publish them outside the USSR, show a panorama very far from the depressive atmosphere described since then. West, this is why “they had an impact on public opinion,” according to Pohlmann.
“After Stalin’s death, there was a kind of liberalization of Russian society; Moscow was changing and he focused specifically on the way women lived, who worked in factories but also had free time and danced or went shopping,” explains the commissioner.
Finally, Pohlmann shows another gem of the exhibition, a documentary film made by the photographer using static images. “The photographs I used to make it are not preserved.” he comments, “just the movie.” He adds that “friends of the African-American poet Langston Hughes and the Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, they created together in the 1930s a cinema group with which they attempted to reproduce the work of Soviet directors such as Sergei Eisenstein” .
The exhibition ends in the portrait room, since Cartier-Bresson did not forget to feature the protagonists of the story, but Pohlmann preferred for the occasion to select heroes who were less bellicose and richer in cultural contributions, such as a young Truman Capote or an elderly Henri Matisse.
