Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) considered himself neither a journalist nor a documentary photographer. A keen observer, his interest was in people, and the things that happened around them. Born into a wealthy Parisian family, he began his career as a painter. But when he purchased a camera while traveling in Africa in 1931, he became interested in photography. The medium offered Cartier-Bresson the possibility of creating an instantaneous sketchbook of time and place, something painting could not do. It was this idea of capturing an instant that led Cartier-Bresson to create one of the most famous phrases in photography—“the decisive moment”—the subject of a book he published in 1952. His credo was concise: “To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.”1 He believed that “of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes forever the precise and transitory instant.”2
In 1932, inspired by his friend André Kertész, Cartier-Bresson purchased a 35mm Leica camera that he would use exclusively for the rest of his career, regarding it as “the extension of my eye.”3 Its small size and excellent lenses made it the perfect camera for him.
In 1947, with photographers Robert Capa, David Seymour, and George Rodger, he founded Magnum Photos, an agency that promoted and distributed photographs by its members, who were often on the road, to news agencies and magazines around the world (he left the agency in 1966). Like his fellow founders, Cartier-Bresson was an international traveler.
In the summer of 1954, Cartier-Bresson traveled to Russia, the first western news photographer allowed into the country after the death of Joseph Stalin the previous year. Russian officials gave him considerable freedom, informing him that he could “photograph everything freely with the exception of military objectives, railway centers, panoramic views of the cities, and certain public monuments.”4 The censors restricted him to Moscow and also required him to develop his film in Russia so they could see the pictures before he left. On this trip, he observed that his “main interest is in the people and that I would like to see them in the streets, in shops, at work, at play, in every visible aspect of daily life.”5 Because the country had been largely inaccessible to foreigners due to Communist rule (Margaret Bourke-White had visited in 1930 and 1941), Cartier-Bresson was in a unique position to bring back the first photographs of a country that had been difficult to access by visitors for many years. In the ten weeks he was in the city, he shot 10,000 images. When he returned to France, he published The People of Moscow (1955), published simultaneously in France as Moscou, vu par Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Cartier-Bresson had been fascinated by the people he met in Russia, and returned to photograph in that country in 1973. His goal was a comparison “with what it once was, looking both for the thread of continuity and for those things that have changed.”6 This time, he was not restricted to the city of Moscow, and traveled throughout the entire country. He published another book as a result of his journey, About Russia (1974).
During this second trip, Cartier-Bresson made a photograph in the Palace Square of the Russian capital of Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. His image depicts a man and a small child walking in the square. Behind them is a towering figure of Lenin—a wooden billboard that had been placed against the facade of the baroque Winter Palace during the annual national holiday on the first of May.
Vladimir Lenin had been Russia’s leader from the time of the Revolution until his death in 1924, during which time he revolutionized the country’s political system. He introduced Socialism, reforming and restructuring the nation with the goal of modernizing and boosting Russia’s struggling economy. His ideas were later taken to extremes by his successor Stalin. The Russian people regarded Lenin as an individual who desired to change the country for the better, yet his political ideas led to the imprisonment and death of millions of citizens under Stalin’s brutal rule. Palace Square was the site of the October Revolution in 1917, and the city was renamed Leningrad in 1924.
In Cartier-Bresson’s photograph, taken twenty years after the death of Stalin, he has created a visual metaphor showing that Russia was still under the shadow of the Communist system, much as the man who walks across the square mirrors the cut-out figure of Lenin, which dwarfs him as he does his son by his side. His head turned down, he looks at his child, perhaps hoping for a better life for him.
The cut-out figure of Lenin appears in several of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs of Palace Square. The photographer likely spent hours or days in the square, framing the figure of Lenin, waiting for the moment when Russian men, women, or children would enter the scene. Of the images he made in this location, the photograph in the Solari Foundation Collection is the
most compelling, not only because it captured a telling instant, but also because it embodies an idea about Russia’s past, its present, and its future. The pictures he took in Russia would be among his last: in 1974 he gave up professional photography and returned to painting with which he had begun his art career.
Michael Woodlee
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Russian Street Scene with Large Billboard of Lenin, 1973, gelatin silver print, 35.6 x 23.5 cm, SOLARI 91.009.001L