Random Moment in the Development of Photography

In his exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, Henri Cartier-Bresson was told by Robert Cappa to not accept the label of a surrealist because that would be the commercial death of him. HCB took his advice but always viewed himself as a surrealist.

So what is surrealism? Why was it so important not to be labeled this in 1946? Why was HCB training all in surrealism? Lets go to the experts at Tate Modern Art Museum for some answers.

The word ‘surrealist’ (suggesting ‘beyond reality’) was coined by the French avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire in a play written in 1903 and performed in 1917. But it was André Breton, leader of a new grouping of poets and artists in Paris, who, in his Surrealist Manifesto (1924), defined surrealism as:

pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.

Typical Tate, always has the perfect answer that just begs for more information. For this Random Moment, lets just say that Surrealism focused on dreams and sub-conscience thought. The goal of the artist was to get out of the way and let their emotional eye take control. 

The single best metaphor of this was how Dali himself approached sleep. He felt sleep was a waste of time, but for his art he needed to let that dream world present itself. He would fall asleep with a key in his hand over a metal plate. As he would drift off into sleep the key would fall and hit the plate waking him and pulling him from his dream world. He would then remember his dream and paint.

This "movement" (an interesting term that we should dive into on some other occasion) was started after World War I in Europe but as with many movements, it seemed to come up in many different ways at the same time. So why would this matter in 1946? Well the truth to that may come from across the ocean and the New World led by Alfred Stieglitz.  

Stieglitz was working to make Photography an art form in its own right and had gotten tired of pictorialism (the movement where the photographer would alter the scene, negative or photograph to make it more about art and less about science) was heralding in Straight Photography (oddly enough it is the abstract nature of straight photography that made it so facinating).  Europe had been dethroned as the leading edge of photographies development and the US, specifically New York had taken over. 

So the world was embracing straight photography and wanted to see what was really their, indicating that there is art and beauty in the real. People were also embracing story telling through photographs, Life Magazine is a fine example of this trend, and wanted a more documentary approach to photography. To be labeled a surrealist was a through back and not what paying advertisers wanted to hear. 

HCB training was largely in surrealism because that is the movement prevalent at the time. As the world adapted to the new order after WWI, surrealism seemed a artistic embrace of the political changes happening. HCB, starting his artistic pursuits in painting, would have been heavily influenced by the contemporary masters of the time.

This is not to say that HCB work was not surrealist, or at least has a heavy element of surrealism in it, it is just to say that HCB had to escape the label and not define himself this way. Definitions in the world of art are not precise, so we often let the artist define themselves. But the truth is that many artists are driven by financial elements and label themselves in a way that will help them financially. Nothing wrong with that, just one way that money influences art, and always has.

But if we take a step back from what the artist says, and look at their work as a whole, we start to see trends which lay beneath the subject matter of a individual picture. Only with a large volume of work, can we start to interpret the artist's work.

The slide show below are images by HCB, many for documentary style magazine layouts. If you look at the images individually, you see the surrealist in him emerge. He was drawn to lines, shapes and geometry which are the linking elements between the dream world and our own.