Autopsy on Henri Cartier-Bresson (or at least his retrospective at the MoMA)
After months and months of seeing the poster on the subway and thinking OH MY GODS I HAVE GOT TO GO SEE THAT EXHIBIT, finally, on the day before it closed, I got my ass to the Museum of Modern Art for their Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit.
Cartier-Bresson sits near the top, if not AT the top, of my personal photographic food chain. Depends on my mood. Some days you feel like an Avedon. Somedays you feel very Meatyard (more and more, this is my default). Some days, some weeks, some very somber and delicious months, it’s all about Nan Goldin. So I went into it feeling very primed for a transcendental, epoch-making artistic experience (like with the Francis Bacon exhibit at the Met, or - probably my favorite large-scale museum exhibit ever - the 2002 Avedon retrospective).
Alas, this was not meant to be. The exhibit looked at the entire range of his career, from 1930 through the 1980’s; I was not familiar with his later years, and found the work from that period pretty weak. From the late 1950’s on, I found he lost - almost without a trace - that amazing spark that makes him so amazing, that knack for capturing an entire exuberant, irrepressible world in the middle of bursting into being. A complex, crazy story that only existed for a fraction of a second, and then vanished, but somehow got caught on film. There are exceptions, of course - like this one, from 1956, one of my favorites of his - but the division between Good/Early Cartier-Bresson and Bad/Late was too stark and too depressing.
Two big rooms full of weak work would be enough to sink an exhibit from a lesser artist, but it’s hard to be upset after standing inches away from this, or this. It doesn’t matter that it happened in 1930 - it’s simply the absolute pinnacle of the photographic art form. Or, at least, a certain aesthetic school of photography. This composition, for example - it’s like this is what Velazquez was shooting for, all along - look at the way their heads are arranged in the frame, look at the diversity of facial expressions, look at the multiple planes of focus - like Las Meninas, except it was created in a 60th of a second instead of over the course of years. And this one - what’s the story here? It breaks my heart, although I have no idea what’s happening.
And of course it’s always profound to be confronted with the actual gelatin-silver print of a photograph that you’ve only ever seen in reproductions in books. Little things like the way that when you get up close to it, you see that the print of this one has uneven edges, like it was cut with scissors instead of a blade cutter. Or big things like the way the 1930s fashion for lower-contrast small-scale prints changes our sense of priorities in images that were darker and clearer and sterner when we first encountered them.
So… not a great exhibit. BUT it was worth the trip, because while I was there I discovered THIS BRILLIANT EXHIBIT of photography by women, from Julia Margaret Cameron in the 1860’s all the way up to the present day. Seriously, SO MUCH INCREDIBLE WORK, from all the folks you know and love (Dorothea Lange, Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Maya Deren, Leni Riefenstahl (in all her despicable, aesthetically-compelling Fascist glory), Nan Goldin, Tina Modotti, Cindy Sherman, Helen Levitt, and on and on… but more importantly and more excitingly, it was full of terrific work by women I’ve never heard of, and i had my camera out snapping tons of shots just of the title cards, so I would know who to Google when I got home.
It’ll be good for about a half-dozen more blog posts, at least. So stay tuned. Or better yet: get your ass to the MoMA and see it for yourself. It’ll be there through March 21, 2011. It’s the kind of thing - like Avedon at the Met - that I’ll want to come back to several times over the course of its run, and experience it differently every time.
Me and Martha Graham, or at least me and a famous 1940 Helen Morgan photograph.
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