Photographic flaneurs

Henri Cartier-Bresson: A Biography, by Pierre Assouline, trans, by David Wilson, London, Thames & Hudson, 2005; 280 pages, $34.95.

Brassai: An Illustrated Biography, by Diane Elisabeth Poirier, Paris, Editions Flammarion, 2005; 208 pages, $49.95.

Lee Miller: A Life, by Carolyn Burke, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2005; 426 pages, $35.

Jacques Henri Lartigue: The Invention of an Artist, by Kevin Moore, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2004; 272 pages, $45.

The generation of high modern photographers, those active in the first half of the 20th century and celebrated as masters in the second haft, is no longer with us. Henri Cartier-Bresson, who died in August 2004, was the last important surviving figure of this era, which included such pioneers as Ansel Adams, Margaret Bourke-White, Bill Brandt, Brassai, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Walker Evans, Andre Kertesz and Man Ray. Historically, too, their achievements are now firmly in the past, as the art world has moved on and wholeheartedly adopted a more interdisciplinary, less "pure" attitude toward mechanically produced images of all sorts.

Yet the early decades of the last century still hold enormous sway over the art-historical imagination--in part because our histories of modern photography were written around them. Above all, Paris, the artistic capital to which many innovators gravitated, provides a romantic center for reconstructing the heady days when an international avant-garde redefined camera-based art.

No one, arguably, was more central to the ambitions and style of modern photography than Cartier-Bresson (b. 1908), whose deceptively casual images of public behavior, collected in the 1952 book The Decisive Moment, became an inspiration for everyone from restive photojournalists to fashion photographers. His knack for sealing an instant of time when form and incident resolved themselves as one, coupled with a Surrealist-inspired yen for chance juxtapositions, set a standard for Robert Frank, Lee Friedlandel, Garry Winogrand and hundreds of their followers. He also provided an esthetic that John Szarkowski, the taste-making photo curator who started at the Museum of Modern Art in 1962 [see A.i.A., May '06], could reenvision in terms of photography's own formal possibilities and vernacular traditions.

Pierre Assouline's biography of Cartier-Bresson is the result of the author's extensive conversations with his subject in the five years before the photographer's death. Not surprisingly, the book has an "as told to" quality that makes it breezy and readable but undercuts any claim it might have to being authoritative. While a scholar would have felt obliged to attribute aspects of the narrative to his sources, which here included the photographer's archives as well as his starving family, friends and professional associates, Assouline, a journalist and magazine editor who has written several previous biographies, is more interested in telling a good story. The result is a kind of autobiography by proxy. What comes through, often enough, is a sense of how the notoriously prickly photographer felt ambivalent about his mission in life, while essential conflicts and tensions (his divorce and remarriage, his rocky relationships with various Surrealists) are left unexamined.

Cartier-Bresson came to photography in his 20s and abandoned it in his 60s in favor of painting. But his career, which began with pictures indebted to the Surrealist notion of automatism and ended with images that functioned as a kind of humanistic photojournalism, spanned both the globe (he was in New Delhi when Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated, in Beijing when Mao's troops entered the city) and the traditional divisions of art and commerce. Like Magnum, the famed photo agency he helped found in 1947, Cartier-Bresson produced work that suited newspapers and magazines but also maintained the trappings of idealism and the aura of art.

While Assouline takes the achievements of Cartier-Bresson as a given, he is adept at providing a social and cultural context for them. His recapitulation of life in the French capital from the 1920s to the immediate post-WWII period is confident and to the point. Where the author stumbles is in accounting for the impact of the art itself; comments like "all that was required for him to achieve the status of a modern classic was to grow older" reveal a profound naivete about artistic temperament and the ways of the art world.

Brassai (who was born Gyula Halasz in Brasso, Transylvania, in 1899) occasionally rubbed shoulders with Cartier-Bresson in Paris in the 1930s, but Brassai was from the other side of the economic tracks and an emigre. Where Cartier-Bresson took his native France largely for granted and traveled widely, Brassai saw his adopted Paris as a source of endless fascination. His pictures of the Parisian demimonde--gay and lesbian revelers, prostitutes, barflies--cemented his reputation as an artist and inspired practitioners like Bill Brandt, Lisette Model and, in our own time, Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin.