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the kiss
How does it feel to know that one of the most romantic images ever made was staged? The famous ‘Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville’ by Robert Doisneau, captured in Paris in 1950, was no other but a manufactured image. Alas, this was revealed by its creator himself in a court trial in the 1990s when, in mid of controversy, Françoise Bornet, a former actress and the woman who was featured with her boyfriend in the photo, sued Doisneau for $18,000 and a share of the royalty in the image.
Her case was dismissed. Doisneau died the next year in 1994. But in the end, few years later, Ms. Bornet sold her original print of the photograph for over $200,000 at an auction (BBC News 25/4/2005) while the rights still remain with Doisneau’s agency.
So does it still feel an iconic image to you, a quintessential Parisian image of passion, a symbol of romantic spontaneity and desire?
“In the early fall, I drank coffee with several generations of the Conner family, the close air of their kitchen settling across my shoulders like a shawl. I explained what I was doing and, as so often happened, their initial suspicion gave way gradually to caution and then to curiosity and a guarded acceptance. They agreed that I could photograph Kelly.
At dawn at the first day of hunting season they called where the deer were beheaded and hung. As I set up the camera, Kelly appeared, buttoned up, accompanied by her mother, her aunt and uncle, her grandparents, cousins, and a few other family members. Arrayed behind me, they remained watchful and intent.
As I pulled her jacket back, to separate her white-shirted figure from the darkness of the shed, I thought I might have heard a murmur. After few minutes I relaxed enough to identify the prevalence of the V shapes in the scene and without thinking I asked Kelly to spread her legs. This time the murmur was audible, but I could see that the picture was complete.”
Text and photograph (above) by Sally Man; from her book ‘At Twelve. Portraits of young women’ (© 1988, Aperture Foundation).
A major photographic exhibition is coming to the North. Representing the first half of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s career (which spans from 1932 to 1946), a photographic material which was carefully selected, printed and mounted to a scrapbook by himself after the World War II, will be shown in the National Media Museum in Bradford from 7th of March to 1st of June 2008.
As the museum’s website reports, “these photographs documented both his extensive travels and
his encounters with Surrealism and modern art. They were conceived as an initial selection for a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a show that would catapult Cartier-Bresson onto the world stage and bring him international recognition. All the original photographs have now been brought together for a new exhibition, showing for the first time in the UK.” (photo left: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Mexico, 1934)
The story about the scrapbook’s making entails few very interesting twists. During World War II, and following Cartier-Bresson’s capture by the Nazis, the curators of the Museum of Modern Art were making arrangements for a posthumous exhibition of his work. But Henri, after three years in prison camps and two unsuccessful attempts, he managed to escape in 1943 and then survived in hiding. Few years later, he found out with pleasure about the MoMA plans and decided to collaborate and curate the exhibition himself, bringing 300 self-made prints glued in a scrapbook to New York!
Cartier-Bresson began photographing the world in 1930, first with a brownie box camera and then, two years later, with his trademark Leica. His photos from expeditions in several countries were published in major journals and he had his first exhibition in Madrid in 1933.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Madrid 1933
Cartier-Bresson was also drawn to the cinema and worked as an assistant director in Jean Renoir’s film ‘The Rules of the Game’ (1939). He also became interested in documenting the Spanish Civil War. At the outbreak of World War II, he was drafted into the French army where he was a corporal in a film and photo unit captured in the Vosges Mountains in June 1940.
The MoMA exhibition, celebrating his survival, opened on February 4, 1947. (Note that the same year he also joined Robert Capa and David Seymour in founding Magnum).The collection includes portraits, such as of Matisse, Picasso and others, as well as street photography, assigned photo essays and reportage of France’s war years.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gestapo Informer, Dessau, Germany, 1945.
The ‘Scrapbook’ has been published in its entirety for first time last year by Thames & Hudson. Cartier-Bresson turned his attention to it in the 1990s again, realising its great importance - especially since the selection of the photos was his own choice. In fact, he rediscovered it in a suitcase in his parents’ house after his mother died. But he was not really ‘a man living in the past’ - as described in the interview below - and left it in the bookshelf. Following his death in 2004, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, the present owner of the prints, finished the job of restoring the photographs, and made their wider publication available.
Llisten here to Martine Franck and Agnès Sire of Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson talking about the history of the Scrapbook. This is an interview hosted in the website of the International Centre of Photography, New York, where the Scrapbook was exhibited last year.
Leeds under construction. The city deconstructed.
Photograph by Christos Stavrou © 2007. All rights reserved
I opened a classic book tonight, The Americans by Robert Frank (1958). A friend left it here with couple other books before Christmas. I went downstairs to search for it. I was left with Robert Frank’s spectators.
In page 37 a young girl working in a cafe or a similar place, is staring towards an unseen space at the left. It could be anywhere in America in the 1950s, when Frank went on the roads with his camera - in fact, the book does not provide any caption for this photo.
Above her head we can see the advertising signs for the shop products. They speak almost louder than her. ‘Steak sandwich’ reads one sign at the far left, and another one just straight in front of us offers ‘jumbo size hot dog’ with big letters - bigger and better than ever, it adds.
And between the signs a seasonal plaque with Santa Claus and Merry Christmas wishes. He is smiling, he seems to know what he is doing, she is not. But their faces echo each other.
I remembered that we just had all those semi-religious western holidays at the turn of the year, accompanied with the usual consumerist noise and emptiness. I think I was a child, about after ten, when first got disappointed by the empty promise of those holidays. A repetitive hedonistic apotheosis, and far too much myth over the capitalist dream of hapiness, the invented needs, which inevitably faded away any personal meaning and importance over the years. Yet, someone always would come these days trying to offer me descriptions of all their wonderful recent shopping. Why, I don’t know. But I stare at their excitement trying to guess, is it real?
Robert Frank captured the commodified transformation of the banal into spectacle. And as Derrick Price argues in his essay Surveyors and Surveyed (2004) , “the people in these photographs are not constituted as ‘poor’ or ‘workers’ or, indeed, as any particular kind of social being. They exist as spectators, gazing out at some invisible scene: other people, the road ahead, a movie screen, a parade going by. In these closed, watchful faces we can read no significant facts, and if we have a sense of ‘being there’, it is as a witness to nothing of any great importance.”
In page 53, a photograph of a Cafe in Beaufort, South Carolina (above). Jack Kerouac writes in the introduction of The Americans that “after seeing these pictures you end up finally not knowing any more whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin.”
Robert Frank’s approach paved the way and moved along new understandings of documentary photography, away from its traditional ties with major social events and facts, following political situations or causes (see for example our previous post about Margaret Bourke-White). Its subject-matter could now be what interests or fascinates the photographer. The new and expanded field of exploration could now penetrate the commonplace life and deal with subjectivities, identities and personal meanings. A jukebox could equally be sad or sadder than a coffin.
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