PICTURES MORE THAN PICTURES

The Work Of Manuel Bravo
and Cartier-Bresson

A picture, to be an interesting picture, must be more than a picture, otherwise it is only a reproduction of an object, and not an object of value in itself.

Anyday, one can walk down the street in a big city and see a thousand people. Any photographer can photograph these people—but very few photographers can make their prints not only reproductions of the people taken, but a comment upon them—or more, a comment upon their lives—or more still, a comment upon the social order that creates these lives.

It is the same with objects as with people. A wall can be merely a wall—but in some of Henri Cartier-Bresson's photographs the walls are painfully human, and live and talk about themselves. There is a vulgar wall behind the man in the brass bed; a great lonesome wall of broken paint and plaster along which some child is wandering; there is a huge sun-bright wall of a prison or an apartment house with a boy who is like a shadow at its base. In other photos there are the tumble-down walls of demolished dwellings in Spain where children are playing in a tumble-down world; in others, the worn-bright gestures of prostitutes against doors that are walls.

There is the clash of sun and shadow, like modern music, in a Renné Cartier-Bresson picture.