A still life in motion

In a 1974 drawing, Henri Cartier-Bresson used pencil and paper to render an image of two dead birds. They are laid out one against the other, as they might have been on a kitchen table by a hunter who had brought home dinner.

The lifeless birds are sketched with an agitated, alert, vibrating line, a quick scribbling of graphite often pressed down hard against the cream-colored paper. (Think Giacometti.) The focused animation of the pencil line provides a contradictory liveliness for what is a quintessential French motif -- nature morte, literally “dead nature,” or what we call in English a still life.

“He tells me that he likes to think of his camera as a gun,” wrote Julian Levy, the art dealer who first introduced Cartier-Bresson’s photographs to the United States at his New York gallery in 1933. Bang! Click! Cartier-Bresson, the great photographer who died Tuesday at age 95 in the south of France, had trained as a painter in his youth, and it was to painting (and drawing) that he returned late in life. But it was with his Leica that the artist set a standard that would endure for much of the 20th century.

That standard is difficult to elucidate, although it’s often described as “the decisive moment” -- the famous title of the American edition of a 1952 book of his distinctive photographs. The French title, “Images a la sauvette” -- furtive pictures -- is actually more revealing for an art expressive of something hidden.

There’s been a lot of arguing since then about precisely what “the decisive moment” means for photography, and even whether such a thing exists. Cartier-Bresson had explained the concept elliptically, as a reflex action of the photographer. With his camera at the ready, he looked inside the constant movement in which life unfolds, searching to find an otherwise imperceptible interval in which all the elements in motion are in balance.

Bang! Click!

Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment came to be most closely associated with a 1932 photograph of a puddle jumper. A man is caught in mid-leap, as he attempts to get across a flooded yard behind a Paris train station. He’s a dark blur, mirrored in the silvery water below.

The thinnest possible sliver of light separates the heel of his shoe from the heel in the reflection, stopping at the split second before the splash. Chaotic flux is suddenly suspended, frozen in an eternal calm before the eruption of a tiny splashing storm. The universe holds its breath.

The pedestrian’s mundane leap is repeated -- in reverse -- in a poster of a ballet dancer plastered on a rear wall. The dancer’s rather more heavenly leap is likewise reflected in the water. Art and life mirror and enliven each other.

Most profoundly, this astounding picture also evokes the photomechanical process by which it was made. The lens of any camera flips light upside-down to reverse and trap an image. “Behind the Gare St.-Lazare, Paris” compounds the wonder by tying together the leaping man, the dancer’s image and their inverted reflections.

Cartier-Bresson photographed the puddle jumper when he was 24. A son of privilege -- his titled father was a wealthy textile merchant -- he had advantages. He frequented the Parisian avant-garde galleries of Kahnweiler and Rosenberg, visited the salon of Gertrude Stein, discussed Rimbaud with the poet Max Jacob, listened to the Surrealists at the Cafe Cyrano discuss how to court spontaneity and enrolled in classes taught by the minor Cubist painter Andre Lhote -- all while still a teenager.

The great photograph behind the train station was unadulterated luck, understood as the stunning intersection of opportunity and talent.

In fact, it’s remarkable to realize how productive Cartier-Bresson was almost from the moment he picked up a camera. A 1987 show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which traveled to the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, was a rich compendium of images made in his first three years as a photographer, from 1932 through 1934. He was on the road a lot, photographing in France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, Cuba and Mexico, and some of his most enduring works -- the puddle jumper, prostitutes in Mexico City, street urchins in Seville -- date from that time.

Cartier-Bresson is sometimes described as a photojournalist, and the work of the 1930s that established his reputation is focused like a laser on the lives of ordinary people. He also helped found Magnum, the premier agency for photojournalists. But rarely did his pictures tell a traditional narrative.

The photojournalist label was more an easy way to explain (and simplify) “the decisive moment” than an apt identification for his work. Later in life, he noted that an editor at Life or Paris Match was more likely to hire someone called a photojournalist than someone called an artist.

But an artist he was. In fact, I think of Cartier-Bresson as the first great camera artist of the motion-picture age. I don’t mean by this that he photographed celebrities, although his published collection of “Photoportraits” includes famous artists, writers, designers, thinkers -- and a lone image of an incandescent Marilyn Monroe -- along with just as many pictures of the hoi polloi. Nor do I mean that his images look like movies or movie stills, nor that they reflect the everyday Surrealism of an environment being newly saturated by media.

What I do mean is that Cartier-Bresson’s photographs make motion emblematic. The dynamism of modern life had been the focus of avant-garde painters at least since Impressionism. Among photographers, everyone from Eadweard Muybridge in the 1870s to Alexander Rodchenko in the 1920s sought to represent it. If matter is energy and the only constant is perpetual flux, Cartier-Bresson’s pictures embody it unlike anything in the previous artistic repertoire. Looking at his still photographs, you are acutely attuned to the fluid experience of time.

Tectonic plates were shifting in the aesthetic culture of the 1930s, when his work came into focus. Sound and color revolutions happened in the movies (Cartier-Bresson sometimes worked with filmmakers, most notably Jean Renoir, and made movies of his own), and motion pictures exploded into a mass art in Europe and the United States. His photographs, absent cinema’s illusion of motion, evoke dynamic force.

Cartier-Bresson’s aesthetic was likewise made possible by a technological advance -- the small hand-held camera, equipped with a fast lens that could capture an image in existing light, or what was then more commonly called the miniature camera. The little Leica he began to use was capable of moving with him, almost (as he often said) as an extension of his eyeball.

He wasn’t the first to use this camera -- just the best. His work is unthinkable without such near-contemporary photographers as Eugene Atget, Martin Munkacsi or Andre Kertesz, and he’s the granite pedestal on which Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and so many other street photographers would later stand. But Cartier-Bresson’s photographs are distinctive, no doubt because so deeply saturated in strategies gleaned from modern painting. His still photographs, like his spirited drawing of dead birds, overflow with vitality.