"Watch out for labels," Robert Capa once told his friend and fellow photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004). "They're going to stick you with one you won't get rid of: that of a little Surrealist photographer. You're going to be lost, you'll become precious and mannered."
That was in 1947, the year that Capa, Cartier-Bresson and some other photojournalists founded the photo agency Magnum. Capa was half right. Cartier-Bresson did get stuck with a label: not "little Surrealist photographer" but "photographer of the decisive moment." Since 1952 and the publication of his book of photographs The Decisive Moment, his name has conjured up unerring vision and hair-trigger timing.
If you want to see Cartier-Bresson when he was still indecisive—about what to print, what to show and what to save—look at the scrapbook he put together in 1946, now reconstructed and published as Henri Cartier-Bresson: Scrapbook, Photographs 1932-1946. It contains multiple versions of many of his iconic photographs. And there's a great story behind it.
In 1940, the Germans took French Army corporal Henri Cartier-Bresson prisoner. By 1942, he was presumed dead, and the Museum of Modern Art was planning a memorial retrospective. He was already famous, having taken many of the shots he's still known for today: puddle jumper at railway station, prostitutes filing their nails, cyclist blurring by a spiral stair.
But Cartier-Bresson was not dead. He escaped in 1943, dug up the Leica camera he had buried in the Vosges Mountains, and was soon working as a photographer and filmmaker in France. In 1945 he got in touch with MOMA curators Beaumont and Nancy Newhall to help out with the "memorial" show.
He printed 346 of his photographs, all roughly index-card size; pasted them onto sheets of paper, eight or so to a page; and put them in a scrapbook for the Newhalls to select from. He included not only the old photos that the curators knew but also new ones.
"The Photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson," the MOMA show, opened with 163 prints in February 1947, and the scrapbook was packed away. It ended up on a shelf until one day in the late 1980s, when Martine Franck, Cartier-Bresson's wife, found him "ripping out the photos" to preserve them. She stopped him, but only a few pages were left.
From the reconstructed book, it's clear that Cartier-Bresson didn't just point and decisively shoot. He found promising settings, lay in wait and took many shots, both vertical and horizontal.
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