Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Scrapbook, Photographs
1932 - 1946
National Media Museum, Bradford
Until 1st June 2008

Reconstructing the exhibition mock-up Henri Cartier-Bresson (“HCB”) put together in 1946 for New York’s Museum of Modern Art, we travel roughly chronologically with this inveterate itinerant around Europe and beyond and trace his pre-Magnum development as a photographer. We see not only the then 38-year-old’s key output to date, but also how he edited and sequenced his own work, and the overall package reveals some of the great man’s weaknesses as well as his formidable strengths. In addition to the diminutive, smaller-than-postcard prints, we also have some video, including a slideshow-accompanied interview from 1973, and several intact pages from the original “scrapbook”.

Scattered amid the competent (but often surprisingly unremarkable) portraits and scenes we find lightning bolts of sensational imagery, when a good photographer suddenly and immeasurably raises his game and becomes unmistakably HCB. He once remarked that you need “a lot of milk to make a little cheese”, but to 21st Century eyes he sometimes left in some of the milk too (for example presenting a number of “similars” as if he could not decide which one worked best) and there are too many pictures by modern-day standards. However, the presence of these marginally less successful images is invaluable in demonstrating photography’s slippery and elusive nature, even in the hands of a universally acclaimed master whose best pictures are simply glorious.

The small prints are just exquisite, such as the fat man floating through a sea of children in “Madrid, Spain 1933”; or two spellbindingly bizarre images both entitled “Valencia, Spain 1933”, one a child rapt as if in a Sufi in a trance, the other a complex, striking configuration featuring a bespectacled, moustachioed man. Incidentally, this latter anticipates multiple-composition imagery by later figures such as Friedlander, and is one of a number to make plain HCB’s underplayed surrealist tendencies.

As you’d expect, the obvious joy HCB took in the “moment de grâce” of shooting a winning composition at just the right time is ubiquitous. A surprisingly large proportion of his most famous images in this mode is from the beginning of his career, and here even these offer a new learning experience. Well-known images like “Hyeres, France 1932” (the one with the bicycle and the spiral staircase) are probably at their most effective in this unfamiliar, miniscule size: in our times of gargantuan wall-sized exhibition prints, these tiny photographs are a revelation, beautiful and delicate objects in themselves. We also learn that the familiar “Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, 1932” (the one with the man jumping a puddle) is a cropped version of the original, HCB feeling it necessary to remove an out-of-focus railing from the composition.

As already mentioned, the great merit of this show, beyond its obvious historical interest, is that it also presents some of HCB’s limitations, which he often happily recognized himself. HCB had little opportunity to photograph wartime events (he spent much of it as a POW, eventually managing to escape), but the few examples he presented here suggest he was no Robert Capa. HCB freely acknowledged that he was no reporter, and in recognizing his talents were more artistic than editorial he actually turned this to his advantage: an assignment to shoot George VI’s coronation in 1937 produced not a single image of the King, but instead a stream of fascinating, often humorous pictures of the crowd.

HCB’s comment “the most difficult thing for me is a portrait” is also borne out by some mixed results, for example his slightly forced, stilted rendering of Paul Eluard at home or of Albert Camus in the street. On the other hand, his almost identical in-the-street approach to photographing Simone de Beauvoir produced a tremendous, brooding atmosphere, and he manages to present an old, infirm Alfred Stieglitz seemingly weighed down by his own perceived failures.

In the final analysis, the near misses only underline the sheer power of the direct hits: images such as the comically bucolic “Sunday on the Banks of the River Marne, 1937”, or the oddly avian “Henri Matisse 1944” burn themselves into the mind for life. Don’t miss this inspirational exhibition, with its much greater than usual depth on one of the real colossi of photography: as HCB pithily pointed out, “Life is once, forever”.

(Review by Simon Bowcock)