Seeing life through Henri Cartier-Bresson’s lens is the closest thing you will find to looking through a fresh pair of eyes. Cartier-Bresson’s images reveal his unerring attention to detail while focusing on the simple gaze. His camera sees while simultaneously providing a hook into the viewer’s emotional menu. Things and moments, both fleeting and seemingly unimportant, become paramount through the image captured by the press of the button.
The Queensland Art Gallery’s (QAG’s) exhibition of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work, ‘The Man, The Image and The World’, included two hundred and sixty images taken over a period of forty years (1930s–1970s), ranging from the intimately poignant to representations of raw emotion and power, every one provoking a sense of awe. Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) first developed his passion for photography in 1932 after practising painting with the artist André Lhote. The QAG exhibition coincided with the Gallery of Modern Art’s (GoMA’s) exhibition, ‘Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams’. This overlap was particularly significant because, while superficially these two exhibitions appear completely different, Cartier-Bresson’s work is very much influenced by surrealist thinking and images. At the age of seventeen, Cartier-Bresson began attending surrealist gatherings in Parisian cafes.
The paintings, photographs and sculptures produced by the surrealists, such as the ones in ‘The Poetry of Dreams’, reflect the artists’ intent to ‘revolutionise human experience in its cultural, social and political aspects’ (Arnold, 2011). The founder of Surrealism, Andre Breton, claimed its true aim was, ‘long live the social revolution, and it alone!’ (Arnold, 2011). With a passionate desire to defy control and convention, the works by the surrealists deal with the unexpected in an attempt to surprise and wrench the viewer from the confines of reality... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline