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International Center of Photography
New York City
May 23-September 2, 2018
For Henri Cartier-Bresson, it was an ironic turn of events. When the first large photo book of the French photographer was simultaneously published in Paris and New York in 1952, its English title, The Decisive Moment, ended up telegraphing a meaning opposite to his intentions. The book's French title, Images å la Sauvette, literally meaning "images on the run," perfectly summed up his approach to photography: operating like a stealthy street peddler without a license, capturing with his lens what he found. But the US publisher Simon St Schuster had culled from his introduction a quote by Cardinal de Retz ("There is nothing in this world which does not have its decisive moment"), extracting a catchy phrase (and perhaps a nod to commerce) for the English title. Cartier-Bresson later bristled at the implication when it became known as his brand, for he didn't believe that a photo could be taken at only one decisive moment.
That is just one of the surprises and contradictions on offer at a new exhibition at the International Center of Photography (ICP), which revisits the artist's influential book. While at the museum, with the goal of delving more into the legacy of this famous photographer, I explored a second show of a newly rediscovered trove of work-also created in the mid-twentieth century-by Elliott Erwitt.
The Decisive Moment show opens with wall text showing a jesting Cartier-Bresson quote: "Magazines end up wrapping french fries, while books remain." Initially I was puzzled by this poke at periodicals from someone who increasingly drew assignments from leading magazines, including Harper's Bazaar and Life, to chronicle momentous historical events (the flight of refugees in India, a gold scare before the Communist takeover of China). But curator Agnės Sire, who worked with the photographer at Magnum Photos in the 1980s and then helped him set up the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris that she now directs artistically, explained to me that he did not consider himself a journalist, at least in the sense of someone seeking "to capture and then to send [images] to a magazine immediately."1 Plus, Sire noted the design constraints of magazines imposed by advertising, adding, "If you proposed to a photographer...