Henri Cartier-Bresson: L’Imaginaire d’après Nature

Ho-hum, you might think, another exhibition of photos by Henri Cartier-Bresson, but that would be very wrong thinking. Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) was such a master of his genre that his …

Ho-hum, you might think, another exhibition of photos by Henri Cartier-Bresson, but that would be very wrong thinking. Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) was such a master of his genre that his timeless images always bear revisiting.

Seeing the photos in the exhibition “Henri Cartier-Bresson: L’Imaginaire d’après Nature” (through September 13) at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris takes us back to the source at a time when photographers have to resort to all kinds of high-tech and artistic manipulation to hold our attention. There’s nothing at all wrong with using special effects in art photography, of course, but it is still amazing to see what HCB, as the French call him, was able to do with absolutely no posing, gimmicks, high-speed shooting or cropping. His brilliant compositions were formed on the spot at the instant the picture was taken. He just looked, waited and shot. As he put it himself (he was also one of those rare artists who was able to speak and write intelligently about his work and his methods), his technique was to “wait, wait, shoot.”

His patience was amply rewarded. One can only wonder at how he captured a fruit vendor sitting under a chalk drawing of a profile that perfectly echoes the man’s despairing pose and even the shape of his features. Almost every image in the show is arresting, some of them very well-known and others less so: a blurred cyclist, for example, seen from above as he speeds down a cobblestoned road at the foot of a spiral staircase in Hyères, France; or two figures framed in wooden rectangles in the arena in Valencia,