Drunk on A World Served Straight

By Richard Lacayo

Henri Cartier-Bresson once said he approached his camera as a "combination of the psychiatrist's couch, a machine gun and a warm kiss." That language has a familiar ring to it. The shock compactions of imagery, the off-kilter linkage of sex, death and Freud -- it all smacks of surrealism. But who would expect to hear it from a great photojournalist? Cartier-Bresson's fame is based on four decades of incomparable camera reporting. Mention his name and what comes to mind is his great surveys of life in China, the Soviet Union and his native France, not the enigmatic jokes of Max Ernst or the dreams on canvas of Magritte.

The persuasive new exhibit that is now at New York City's Museum of Modern Art is going to change that. Curator Peter Galassi has mounted 90 photographs that Cartier-Bresson, 79, took at the outset of his career, mostly from 1932 through 1934. During those years he put aside his ambitions as a painter and began stalking the streets of three continents with a lightweight Leica and a potent surrealist intuition, an eye for the unearthly subtext of ordinary scenes. Add his powerful gift for spatial arrangement, and the result, says Galassi, is "one of the great, concentrated episodes of modern art."

In that brief span of time, Cartier-Bresson took dozens of his best-known pictures: Spanish children playing in the rubble of a building, a reflected figure leaping across a puddle behind the Gare St.-Lazare, Mexican prostitutes popping weirdly out of doorway slots. Galassi is not the first to cite surrealism as the force that conferred upon this early work its compelling strangeness, but he makes the decisive case. By the end of this exhibit's seven-city tour -- it goes to Detroit, Chicago, San Diego, Framingham, Mass., Houston and Ottawa through May 1989 -- no one will be able to look again at these pictures without seeing how they hold reality at just the right angle to be read as a dream.

Because of his later reputation as a photojournalist and the co-founder of the Magnum photo agency, it is easy to forget Cartier-Bresson's debt to Andre Breton, surrealism's chief standard-bearer and truest believer. Breton and his circle of poets and artists wanted to revolutionize both consciousness and society through the purposeful absurdities of the unconscious. To dislodge conventional habits of mind, they practiced unpremeditated methods of creation, "unguided" sketching and automatic writing. Moved by their example, Cartier-Bresson realized that his Leica was the most automatic art instrument of all, one that could make split-second images that owed much to chance and much less to calculation.

The volume that accompanies the show, Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Work (Museum of Modern Art, New York; $35), quotes him this way: "I was marked, not by surrealist painting, but by the conceptions of Breton . . . the role of spontaneous expression and of intuition and, above all, the attitude of revolt." Accordingly, his surrealism was not just a matter of finding at large the fetishes and props of Dali and Magritte, though in a picture like his 1932 portrait of the art dealer Pierre Colle, he found them anyway , -- Colle becomes an inverted head with an ectoplasmic swirl of bedclothes for a body. What Cartier-Bresson looked for more often was scenes in which the quotients of the mundane and the marvelous appear held in a balance impossible to fix. This is exactly the secret of his 1933 picture Valencia. The image of a boy looking skyward takes its ambiguous charge simply from the mottled wall behind him, a surface with the gravity of the Elegies to the Spanish Republic that Robert Motherwell would put on canvas years later.

Galassi may be pressing his point too far when he tries to insist that these early pictures "have virtually nothing to do with photojournalism." Personal revelation and social reportage are too tightly entwined in them to be easily untangled. His outlook shaped by the powerful anti-Fascist movements of the 1930s, Cartier-Bresson was drawn to a leftist sentiment that was shared by most of the surrealists. They believed, in any case, that the visions they sought were best discovered on the margins of society, away from the stultifying bourgeoisie, among the dispossessed, despised and overlooked. Which is why vagrants, prostitutes and poor children fill his pictures. To him they were both earthly outcasts and divine purveyors of the irrational, reality's own surplus value.

As it happened, it was a different kind of photography that became associated with surrealism: the solarized portraits of Man Ray, the looming nudes of Bill Brandt, pictures full of lens distortions and darkroom tricks that brought to mind the outright fantasies of surrealist painting. Cartier- Bresson's genius lay in his recognition that unretouched reality was already tractable enough, that the world was most intoxicating when served straight up.