From January 11th to April 22nd, 2012, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson is exhibiting 90 black-and-white prints, some never shown before, by Paul Strand and Henri Cartier-Bresson, covering their travels to Mexico from 1932 to 1934.

However, as Clément Chéroux (co-author, with Agnès Sire, of the exhibition’s catalogue) points out, at first glance we might struggle to find some parallel between the two photographers’ works, at least at that time in Mexico.

"Le Mexique en partage, un tropisme politique" the title of Chéroux’s contribution to the catalogue, provides us with the essential keys to understanding their journey and the work produced as a result. The two photographers came to Mexico for both historical and ideological reasons. With the help of the Mexican composer Carlos Chavez, Paul Strand arrived in Mexico in November 1932. Strand had just turned forty, and just separated from his wife, Rebecca, he had received word that his application for a Guggenheim Foundation grant had been rejected, all the while trying to escape the influence of Alfred Stieglitz.

Cartier-Bresson was, according to Agnès Sire, at loose ends: “I’d like to go see what’s happening in China, or be a photographer on some sort of ethnographic mission... I’m suffocating in Paris,” he declared upon his return from Spain in 1932. It was in this context that he joined a mission for Mexico organized by doctor Julio Brandan. The funding fell through, but Cartier-Bresson decided to stay in Mexico.
One point the men had in common was that they both exhibited their work while in Mexico. On February 3, 1933, Paul Strand exhibited 55 platinum prints, and from March 11 through 23, a selection of Cartier-Bresson’s Mexican photographs appeared alongside Manuel Alvarez-Bravo’s at the Palacio de Bellas Artes de Mexico.

Their styles and concerns differed, as is evident in this exhibition, but behind their differences the viewer will see a shared political engagement.

Mexico was the country of the successful revolution, “the country where we would like to live,” as the poet Robert Desnos put it in the daily newspaper Le Soir in 1928. According to Chéroux, “The country exerted a powerful magnetic pull on Communists and Marxists.” From writers André Breton to John Dos Passos, photographers Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Helen Levitt and Robert Capa, and filmmakers Sergeï Eisenstein and, later, Luis Bunuel, Mexico was an attractive destination for artists.

For our two photographers, the political question is also the “reason of their Mexican tropism.” This has to be understood from the political perspective of the era, according to Cartier-Bresson, even if it’s difficult to notice it in the Mexican work. Nevertheless, his photographs of Mexico were exhibited from May 16 to June 4, 1936, at the Galerie Pléiade under the aegis of the AEAR (Association of Revolutionary Artists and Writers) and published in the politically engaged magazine Regards in October 1937. As for Paul Strand, in 1940 he published a portfolio of twenty, Photographs of Mexico, in a limited edition of 250 , of hand varnished photogravures.

For both photographers, this journey to Mexico would be followed by political engagement that would see Strand travel to Moscow from May to July 1935 and become a member of the American Labor Party from 1937 to 1947, after he fled to France to escape the rise of McCarthyism in the US. Cartier-Bresson, for his part as he told Pierre Assouline in 1986, would continue to vote for the Communist party until the repression of the Hungarian revolt in 1956.
For both photographers, Mexico was also linked to the cinema, perhaps in pursuit of Lenin’s famous dictum, “Of all the arts, the most important for us is the cinema.”

An age difference of eighteen years between Paul Strand and the Frenchman explains the former’s advanced involvement with the cinema. In April 1933, Chavez entrusted him with the direction of instructional films and, at the same time, he worked on the script of Redes (released in the US as The Wave), his first feature-length film one that tried to expose the exploitation of fishermen and show their struggle to survive.

For Cartier-Bresson, Mexico was where he first discovered the potential of the moving image. In a letter from August 14, 1934, he begged his parents to send him an Eyemo model Bell & Howell movie camera.

He wrote in a 1985 article for Les Cahiers de la photographie, “I stopped taking pictures in 1935 when I was in New York. Photography was for me but one of many means of visual expression... I went with others to Paul Strand’s house to learn cinema.

In 1953 in his L’art de la photographie, Georges Sadoul compared Paul Strand’s La France de profil with Cartier-Bresson’s Images à la sauvette. As Clément Cheroux reminds us, Sadoul remarked on their differences of style, “Their processes for different creations... their antagonistic temperaments, their profoundly different photographic vision.” The difference is rooted in their divergent conceptions of “realism,” a naturalistic realism inherited from the 19th century painters as opposed to the new realism of Aragon, “from the days of the popular front, concerned moreover with social questionning.”
Seen from this perspective, this exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson forces the viewer to see man rather than the legends.

Bernard Perrine
Bernard.Perrine1@orange.fr

Exhibition

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Paul Strand / Mexique
1932 - 1934
January 11 - April 22, 2012

Fondation HCB
2 Impasse Lebouis
75014 Paris

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Paul Strand
Mexique 1932-1934

Preface by Agnès Sire
Essay by Clément Chéroux
Éditions Steidl