Volume 50, Number 11 · July 3, 2003
Secret Geometry
By John Banville
Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Man, the Image and the World
with essays by Philippe Arbaïzar, Jean Clair, Claude Cookman, Robert Delpire, Peter Galassi, Jean-Noël Jeanneney, Jean Leymarie, and Serge Toubiana, and with translations from the French by Jane Brenton
Thames and Hudson, 431 pp., $75.00
Most artists maintain an attitude of healthy disrespect toward their own work. They know, better and with more bitterness than any critic, how far short of their ambitions their art inevitably falls. What, the artist would demand of his admirer, do you really think this is the best I am capable of? Do you really imagine I am satisfied with these botched results of my transcendent intentions? Henri Cartier-Bresson's dismissal of his life's work in photography is at another level of dissatisfaction, however; it seems almost contempt, almost hatred, not just for his achievement but for the medium itself. Repeatedly and with increasing vehemence during the past thirty-odd years, since he virtually gave up taking pictures in his early sixties, he has insisted that not only has he lost interest in photography, but that he never much cared for it even at the height of his career and fame.
Review, 3692 words
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