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| Tete a Tete portraits by Henri Cartier-Bresson, introduction by E. H. Gombrich, was published by the National Portrait Gallery, 1998. |
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| Other articles by Carlo Gébler |
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| Robert Oppenheimer |
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| Avigdor Arikha |
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| The Great Frenchman |
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| 'Tete a Tete' is a book of portraits by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Most of the portraits show just the head and shoulders although occasionally we get a patch of garden, a sliver of street, a wife. Lovers of the great Frenchman, especially those who drooled at the 'Europeans' exhibition at the Hayward earlier this year, may protest. Is it not perverse to accent just the one strand even if it's the strand that has most preoccupied Cartier-Bresson himself? My opinion is that people are what Cartier-Bresson does best. That, for me, is the justification for this. |
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| Some of the figures in the collection will be known to readers. Others won't. Who was Lord Drogheda? (photographed in 1967) But this doesn't matter. Even when you don't have any special knowledge, the quality of the images will satisfy. The light, the composition, the placing of the subject in space, the clues in the mise-en-scene, everything in these photographs is always right. A sense of beauty this good are rare in modern work (although they are making comeback). When I look at 'Tete a Tete' I am reminded, therefore, of how much we have lost because of our headstrong and ill considered embrace of a kind of restless modernism. |
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| Speaking of which, these pictures also have a great deal of instruction to offer regarding something else we have lost, our patience. Take the startling picture of Avigdor Arikha (1985) for example. This shows the subject as he moves a painting of a female nude. Meanwhile on the easel, there is a canvas of Arikha, arm out, in exactly the same pose. Life is imitating art, and vice versa. This decisive moment looks as if it were easy to take. It wasn't. As anyone who has tried to take a picture that relies on juxtaposition will tell you, you have to wait for ever to get it and yet the window of opportunity when everything falls into place lasts almost no time at all. Nowadays, no one seems to take that kind of time and care. |
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| Doubtless each reader will have his or her favourite in this collection, but for me every picture really was as good as every other. Every picture here, I felt, was the indisputably best, never to be bettered portrait of the subject in question. Picking one at random, I would say, for example, the picture of Robert Oppenheimer at his over organized desk with the mysterious brown envelope on the blotter is the definitive portrait of the man who made the bomb and wished he hadn't. Add 133 more to make the final total of 134 portraits, and that's a lot of perfection between the covers. Few works today come anywhere near it. |
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| A work of art (and all these photographs are that) is a revelation. These pictures tell you about the subject but they also speak of the maker. What these photographs tell you about Cartier-Bresson is that he is an extremely agreeable and likeable man. You can tell that by looking at the subjects. None of those who knew they were being photographed (the bulk of the people in the book) seem nervous or put out or anxious or threatened. And more than that; all the subjects seem happy to surrender themselves to this photographer and his enterprise, even as the picture is being taken, and therefore before they have seen the results (although frankly I could not imagine that any of the subjects would have taken exception to their portrait). Every subject here knows they are loved and valued by the photographer, even those subjects who we know, anecdotally, were very hard to love, like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. |
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| The media (in all forms) has become a voracious devourer and hater of people, a ruthless hurter and user of people. There is less respect today than there used to be, and a greater willingness than ever before, on the part of artists, to hurt and denigrate and shit upon others from a great height in the name of their careers, their irony or their talent. To read 'Tete a Tete' is to be restored (albeit temporarily) to a kinder, gentler world where gentle curiosity and tender compassion are in infinite supply. |
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| Carlo Gébler |
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