Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century

The opening image of Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century (on show at SFMOMA until 30 January 2011) - the first retrospective of the legendary photographer’s work since his death in 2004 - shows five people picnicking on a grassy hillside near Juvisy, France, in 1938. It is an ample spread, with bottles and blankets and empty plates. A boat sits in the water below, with fishing poles extended every which way. The man directly in front of us pouring the wine appears to be in mid-sentence; one lady further down the slope is clearly enjoying a chicken wing. You can almost taste the wine and feel the air on your shoulders. We are at the picnic, are we not?

Cartier Bresson's early years were spent capturing inventive images on the fly. In the early 1930s he showed, using his handheld Leica, the thrilling creativity and possibility of modern photography, which allowed one to take a camera anywhere. But this period was just the beginning for a man who would become known for his singular talent for capturing 'the decisive moment' (also the fitting title of his first major book of photographs, published in 1952).

The show is arranged thematically and spans his entire career, from those electric early images - many of which, like the cyclist zooming by a zigzagging staircase on the curving, cobbled street of Hyères in France in 1932, take pleasure in life’s patterns, shadows, and geometry - to his later position as 'the keenest observer of the global theatre of human affairs - and one of the great portraitists of the twentieth century'. 

During World War II, Cartier-Bresson was taken prisoner, escaping from a Nazi work camp in 1943. His postwar work reflects a shift in style; the clarity and balance of his images was refined to focus on simple, gripping scenes that could bear the weight of a larger story. A photo from this era, New York, 1946, documents a mother and son being reunited on a dock after the war. In the midst of a kinetic crowd, the mother pulls her weeping son close. It is an intense, emotionally powerful image. 

In the decades that followed, Cartier-Bresson the artist and Cartier-Bresson the photojournalist became one, witnessing heady events in world history through specific moments: Gandhi’s funeral pyre on the banks of Delhi’s Sumna River in 1948; that same year, a desperate run on Shanghai’s banks for gold just before the Communist takeover of China; tranquil rice fields in Indonesia in 1950, at the time of independence; goggle-eyed Chinese children watching television for the first time during Mao’s Great Leap Forward in 1958. He documented the mundane: grocery shopping in Switzerland, the suntanned life of leisure in 1950s Miami, but elevated it through the scope of his work into a larger commentary on the clash of old and new in Europe and the excesses of the American postwar boom. 

Let us come back to the image of the picnic. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s great gift was his knack for creating poignant, lasting images from a fast-moving world. Come see this show before it moves on.

Bonnie Tsui lives in San Francisco. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and the author of American Chinatown.

Following its run at SFMOMA, Henri Cartier Bresson: The Modern Century will be on show at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, from 19 February until 29 May 2011.