Is there a Cartier-Bresson style?

This is a photo of a guy smoking a pipe on the Pont des Arts in Paris. It was taken at a time when people liked photos without colours. The framing is nice, clever. On the left, the eye is led to the other bank through the blur of a light fog. And, at the same time, on the right, we are very clear on the man who seems to occupy the centre of the image without being there. The shot gains in spontaneity as well as in depth. And the guy with the pipe is called Jean-Paul Sartre.

Gandhi, Marilyn Monroe, Fidel Castro, Albert Camus... What remains today of Henri Cartier-Bresson's photographic art if we remove all the celebrity dimension from these photographs? A mass, a gigantic collection of thousands of street photographs, many of which fortunately found their way into François Pinault's collection in 2014. Photos that all amateur photographers have copied since then.

It is from this collection that the images currently on display at the BNF and the Musée Carnavalet were taken. On the Pinault side, the curators were Annie Leibovitz, Sylvie Aubenas, Javier Cercas and Wim Wenders. All big names in image and meaning. But the people are back. Paradoxical for an everyday photographer.

The problem is that it is very chic to love Cartier-Bresson! But it is also the solution! If it were not fashionable to pin a postcard of the master on one's wall, the Prévert-like poetry of his small black and white rectangles would have been smothered by the dust of indifference long ago. His work alone would have remained. But anonymous.

Mathieu Hummery, the Grand Jeu's éminence grise, puts it best when he says that Cartier-Bresson is "a pop artist: many people know his images without knowing that they are his". So there is no Cartier-Bresson style. Just a Parisian wandering crossed, in number, by flashes of light. With all the formal sobriety required to make these flashes obvious. Classics.

By the way, the guy in the other photo who is sheltering from the rain by sticking his head into his mackintosh as if he had no neck... that's Alberto Giacometti.

Photo :

- Henri Cartier-Bresson - Albert Camus - Paris 1944
- Henri Cartier-Bresson - Che Guevara - Cuba 1963