Wink of a Glass Eye

One thing a camera does superbly is to seize the moment. Last week Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art put on a show of pictures--each made in a wink--which brought back moments from the past decade more vividly than memory can. They were candid camera shots snapped by France's most distinguished documentary photographer, Henri Carder-Bresson.

Unlike artier cameramen, Carder-Bresson has never felt the need of a studio or a darkroom. He still reloads his Leica under the bed, washes his prints in the bathtub. "Shooting a picture," says he, "is like shooting rabbit or partridge. Before shooting you think, you contemplate, you look, look, look, look. Then you shoot, and get it."

Carder-Bresson began as a painter, and still paints for fun, but at 38 he is primarily a historian. Spain's Civil War, the people of Mexico, Manhattan's "Little Italy," the coronation of England's George VI, Paris, and the littered banks of the Marne on a prewar Sunday have all been seized in the enduring glimpses of his camera's glass eye.

Carder-Bresson was a corporal in the French army, spent 36 months in German P.W. camps. Twice he escaped and was recaptured. The third try worked. He went underground in Paris, emerged to photograph the liberation of fellow French prisoners by the Allies. Some of the results--such as his picture of a Gestapo informer being recognized by an ecstatically vengeful ex-prisoner at a D.P. interrogation center (see cut)--were masterpieces of tragic force.

Last week Carder-Bresson contemplated the windowed gorges of Manhattan, while his wife--Javanese Dancer Ratna Mohini --rehearsed for a recital. He took his camera everywhere about the city, peering, with an explorer's lust for the unknown, into thousands of hurrying faces. "Human faces," Carder-Bresson mused, "are such a world!"

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