Who is the practitioner (what is their name?) and when were they practicing?
Henri Cartier-Bresson was an incredibly prominent French photography throughout the 20th century. Born in 1908 just outside of Paris, Cartier-Bresson studied in central Paris and began focusing on photography in the early 1930s after he discovered the works of Martin Mankacsi in Arts et Metiers Graphiques, an arts magazine active from the 1920s until 1939. Active from the early 1930s right up until the early 2000s, Henri Cartier-Bresson was perhaps most known for both his surrealist approaches to photography and also as a founding member of Magnum Photography (an international photojournalist cooperative) that Cartier-Bresson himself described as “…a community of thought, a shared human quality, a curiosity about what is going on in the world, a respect for what is going on and a desire to transcribe it visually.” (Pro.magnumphotos.com, 2020)
What is the title of the photo or video you have chosen to analyse (can you provide a link?)
The photo I have chosen is Place de l’Europe Gare Saint Lazare. It is currently available to be seen in person in person at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, or online at this address.
With the photo or video, you are examining when was it produced (date)?
The photo was produced at some point in 1932.
How was the photo or video authored?
The photo was captured on Cartier-Bresson’s Leica camera, very soon after her purchased it in the same year. He used 35mm film to capture the image. As for mis-en-scene, he attempted to capture the moment right before the worker hit the ground, in an attempt to create a timeless sense within the photograph. This became an enormous part of Cartier-Bresson’s philosophical view on photography. He coined the term “the decisive moment” when aiming to capture these kinds of fleeting images. It is also interesting to note that this particular photos is one of the very few that Cartier-Bresson decided to crop. Usually, he would leave the entire image in its entire, but Cartier-Bresson decided to crop out a portion of fence in the foreground that slightly protruded into the bottom of the frame.
How was the photo or video published?
The photo was published in a Gelatine Silver process. Silver salt is suspended in gelatine is coated onto the desired print medium (paper, glass, plastic, film etc) and then exposed to a negative. The coating holds a latent image, which is then revealed with a developing agent.
How was the photo or video distributed?
This photo is most known from a book distributed by Simon and Schustser in 1952. It was a collage of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work encapsulating his ideology of capturing moments in time on film. The book titled The Decisive Moment ( originally Images de la Sauvette in French) is one of the most famous in photographic history, as it assembled an enormous variety of Cartier-Bresson’s early works. This particular photo is one of the most well known from the collection and can now be seen in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
References:
ABC News. (2020). Place de l’Europe. Gare Saint Lazare 1932. [online] Available at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-26/france.-paris.-place-de-l27europe.-gare-saint-lazare-19322c-b/2857312 [Accessed 8 Feb. 2020].
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson. (2020). Biography – Henri Cartier-Bresson. [online] Available at: https://www.henricartierbresson.org/en/hcb/biography/ [Accessed 8 Feb. 2020].
Pro.magnumphotos.com. (2020). History of Magnum. [online] Available at: https://pro.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAX_2&FRM=Frame:MAX_3 [Accessed 7 Feb. 2020].
Steidl Verlag. (2020). The Decisive Moment – Henri Cartier-Bresson. [online] Available at: https://steidl.de/Books/The-Decisive-Moment-0516515559.html [Accessed 10 Feb. 2020].
Wade, J. (2015). The Leica I: The Camera that Changed Photography. [online] Shutterbug. Available at: https://www.shutterbug.com/content/leica-i-camera-change-photography [Accessed 10 Feb. 2020].
The Art Story. (2020). Henri Cartier-Bresson Artworks & Famous Photography. [online] Available at: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/cartier-bresson-henri/artworks/ [Accessed 10 Feb. 2020].
The Most Influential Images of All Time. (2020). See The Story Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare. [online] Available at: http://100photos.time.com/photos/henri-cartier-bresson-behind-gare-saint-lazare [Accessed 8 Feb. 2020].