Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Cubist Masterpiece

Henri Cartier-Bresson’s masterful 1933 photograph, “Valencia, Spain,” is what one might imagine a cubist photograph to look like. Shot from inside a Spanish bullring, the photographer captures a seemingly insignificant moment and lends the image significance through his careful composition. Bresson’s image is that of an arena door that is slightly ajar. Peering out of a rectangle in the door to the right is a slightly chubby man in glasses and a hat. Behind him we see a blurry wall bathed in light. Through the crack between the two doors stands a similarly dressed man peering out of a rectangle in the exact opposite direction. Decorating the doors that make up most of the foreground is a bull’s-eye with a big “7” in the middle. This bull’s-eye is placed with the middle of the two doors cutting down the center of it. As a result of the two doors being ajar, this bull’s-eye is fragmented into two pieces with the right side coming nearer to us and the left side receding further off into the distance.

The image has a pretty shallow depth of focus. The focus in this is on the left side of the door and extends across the image to the man on the right who is looking out to the right. Out of focus are the right side door that is opening towards us and the man in the back. One curious bit about the image is that of the glasses being worn by the man whose face we can see. Only the left lens of his glasses is catching the light and because of that it’s white from the glare while through the other we can see the man’s eye.

Bresson took this photo at the age of 24, throughout his long career (he lived to be 95) Bresson did much writing, drawing, and painting in addition to his photography. Even though he considered photography a craft not really worth taking as seriously as drawing or painting, in his writings he shared theories on the art of photography that have been very influential. Bresson’s most well known contribution to the field of photographic theory is that of the “decisive moment”. He’s famously quoted as saying “to take photographs means to recognize - simultaneously and within a fraction of a second - both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning.” It’s this one moment that defines an event that is the “decisive moment.” Everything has a decisive moment and Bresson excelled at knowing when that moment was and capturing it in a manner that used that moment for all it was worth.

From the man jumping over a puddle but not quite jumping far enough to a Gestapo informer being recognized by a woman she had denounced, Bresson captured decisive moments that told stories because he knew the one exact moment that he’d need in order to best tell them. This talent is what made him one of the most influential photographers ever and the man who “transformed press photography into photojournalism.” He loathed photos that were setup and instead preferred a naturalism in his photos that was a result of his doing as little as possible to intrude upon the scene taking place. When taking photos he often hid his small Leica camera until the moment he was going to snap a photo, he would then pull it out and take a picture and then tuck it away again. In order to be as inconspicuous as possible, he even had the shiny parts of his camera covered with black tape.

Although best known for his photojournalistic work, the image taken in Valencia betrays another side of Bresson. In the late 1920s, as a young student in Paris, Bresson would often sit in on meetings held by surrealists. In these now famous meetings led by André Breton and attended by the likes of Salvador Dali, Bresson kept his mouth shut and just absorbed what the older artists and intellectuals had to say. The influence of the surrealists on him is apparent in many of his early photos but before meeting the surrealists, Bresson had studied with the cubist sculptor André Lhote at the Lhote Academy in Paris. Lhote was concerned with trying to meld cubist and classical approaches to art and, at least in the case of this particular photo, one can’t help but think that Lhote’s cubist influence played a larger role on Bresson than the surrealists did. Bresson preferred to use the words “geometry” instead of “composition” and it’s his supreme understanding of the significance of geometry that he must have learned from his cubist influences and applied to this study in unifying cubism with photography.

It’s this unification of cubism and photography coupled with Bresson’s disinterest in staged photographs that I initially found so remarkable. It’s an image that echoes and rhymes within itself to so many degrees that it’s hard to believe Bresson could have just happened to see it and capture it. I was relieved to find (only because the thought that a human could compose and capture this image in an instant is too much for my own ego to handle) one piece of evidence that this particular photo is not one that he took in an instant and was through with. What I found was that two versions of the photo actually exist in various public collections and it’s nearly impossible to know if he took others but never printed them. What is also known is that Bresson rarely dwelled on one subject or composition for very long, he knew what he wanted and usually got it right away, but in the case of this photo he took and printed two different versions.

The existence of multiple versions in light of the previously mentioned facts seems to indicate some sort of hesitance or extra intellectual thought that went into the creation of this image. The second version of the photo is cropped differently as if Bresson wanted to frame it a couple different ways. In the other version of the photograph, the side of the door on the left is cropped out and the person in the background is either somebody else or the person has taken his hat off. As for the man looking out the rectangle on the right side, he is now looking to the left in the second version of the photo although the single glaring lens has been preserved. Instead of telling a story or conveying an emotion or mood with the image, Bresson seems to have wanted to make an intellectual argument with his image. The existence of multiple versions tells us that he wanted to say something and was trying to figure out how best to say it. This was an image lacking a decisive moment, it instead possessed a decisive composition that he was trying to capture.

Upon walking past the version of the photo I’m writing on while at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a writer for the New York Times wrote that “Cartier-Bresson's pictures are ingenious Chinese boxes: humane miracles of rhyming form and surreal happenstance that beg to be unpacked.” Both of the versions of the photo are indeed images worthy of unpacking but I feel that the version I’ve chosen to write on is visually a much more interesting picture and has more layers to peel away. The version that I’m not writing on is actually the better known version of the image and I’m a bit dumbfounded by that fact. I can only assume that it’s because all the prints of the one I chose are in private collections or for one reason or another not as many prints were made.

We live in a society in which people generally don’t believe something unless they see it with their eyes. “I won’t believe it until I see it” is a phrase that one hears thrown around all the time. Even in a time when people have easy access to computers and using Adobe Photoshop one can doctor a photo as easily as taking one, people will believe something they see a picture or video of. In the early 1900s and when photography was just being invented the power of photography to persuade people that what they were seeing is real was even greater. Photography allowed people to see far away places exactly as they were, it was perceived to be a window to another world without an artist in between. This attitude reflects the perception that photography really wasn’t considered an art, it was more of a utilitarian tool than an artistic one. The reaction of painters to the invention was mixed. For some it was a handy tool to use for their paintings and for others it was something that was trying to replace painting in representing objects. The idea that photography was an art with different styles and different uses wasn’t very widespread. Generally, the purpose of photography was to just capture and faithfully reproduce the likeness of objects.

The purpose of this image is far from that. It wasn’t taken to tell us that there is an arena in Spain with a door that has a bull’s-eye with a “7” painted on it and that once there was a man looking out one of the windows. While many images of Bresson’s could be viewed as a window into the past this isn’t one of them. If it is a window to the past, it isn’t a visual one. It’s more conceptual and intellectual. It’s about the unifying of two disparate ideas. The scene itself is banal of no consquence.

Bresson’s photograph is remarkable because he uses something he found in real life and makes an image that doesn’t really represent anything, instead it looks more like a cubist collage that Picasso or Braque might have thrown together. He strays from the traditional function of photography and does something in a style that one wouldn’t expect to translate well into the medium. Just as artists like Picasso were playful in their use of shapes and collage, Bresson has a lot of fun with this image.

The most striking aspects of this photograph are the fragmentation of space and shape. The door is open and cuts the bull’s-eye and seven in half, the man’s head floats in a rectangle, we see through the doors to half of a man’s body. Everything is ajar just as the door is. The breaking in half of the bull’s-eye is seen by some as a criticism of the “bull’s-eye school of photographic composition” in which photographers just aimed to get the subject in the middle of the photo and paid less attention to other aspects of photography such as a composition. I think it’s entirely possible that the thought crossed his mind and it does add to the image’s confrontation with the role of photography in art but I’m not entirely convinced of this idea.

What I find the most fascinating about the image is the way in which it rhymes with itself, echoes itself, and even feels like it could implode on itself. The inclusions of glare on just one eyeglass makes it rhyme with the white circle the seven is enclosed in. The person in the front and back echo each other by both looking out rectangles in exactly opposite directions and even the bull’s-eye feels like it’s echoing as the rings extend outward, one after another. One could even imagine that the person in the back is the same person that is in the front and that we are looking through one of the rectangles that we see in the back. It’s even possible (albeit highly unlikely) that there is a giant mirror back there and what we are seeing is the back of the person in the front reflected back at us and the only reason we can’t see the photographer is because he’s obscured in the darkness of the rectangle windows in the back.

Were there to be a mirror back there, it would explain a very strange phenomenon in the image but it’s more likely that it was just serendipity. Behind the man in the front is a brick wall that is well lit by the sun. The wall that the man in the back is standing in front of is dark and made of wood. These two spaces are very close together yet look completely different in material and lighting. This further adds to the image’s feeling of being a collage of images taken at different places and pieced together instead of an image captured in one place without any setting up or an abundance of pre-planning.

For all of Bresson’s interplay between various parts of the image, what ultimately makes the image more than just a fruitless exercise in visual fun is that everything in the image is at odds with its visual partner. Bresson seems to be saying that ultimately everything in art and the world is meant to be in opposition. The visual tension between the various elements is representative of the tensions between everything that make the world operate. The doors will never fully close, rings don’t always align themselves and fall perfectly into place, numbers will split, disappear, and be put back together, and we can never fully clearly see the whole picture or really understand how something works. Bresson seems to view the world as one full of missed connections and misaligned parts that ultimately render much of the world impossible to fully understand.

For all of the image’s pessimism, the sense of awe and joy that it inspires when studying the construction of it also seems to say something to the viewer. Bresson shows us that the world is filled with beauty and visual complexity. In light of all the work that it took painters to invent and create astonishing new places and images, Bresson conjured a snapshot of daily life that is just as astonishing in all its visual complexities as a cubist or surrealist painting. Instead of inventing a bizarre new world, he shows us that the everyday world is astonishing and full of beauty if you just take the time to look hard enough.