Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteAn Inner Silence: The Portraits of Henri Cartier-Bresson
Among others:
Christian Dior
Alberto Giacometti
Arthur Honegger
Jawaharial Nehru
Colette
Ezra Pound
Andre Breton
Marcel Duchamp
Roberto Rosselini
Alexander Calder
William Faulkner
Carson McCullers
Arthur Miller
Martin Luther King
Pablo Neruda
Robert Oppenheimer
Jean Genet
Jean-Paul Sartre
Albert Camus
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Simone de Beauvoir
Joan Miro
Saul Steinberg
Alfred Stieglitz
Susan Sontag
Truman Capote
Marc Chagall
Edith Piaf
Igor Stravinsky
Coco Chanel
Henri Matisse
Carl Gustave Jung
Alexy Brodovich
John Huston
Marilyn Monroe
George Brazue
Samuel Beckett
The photographer needs no introduction.
The photographs selected, and quite a few more personalities than listed here have been presented, represent the first exhibition launched by Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson (January 18 to April 9, 2006).
The cultures of the open societies nurture always a thin but potent strand of artists and intellectuals, entertainers and philosophers, and however much they may bicker individually, they roam through time as a pack. Bresson's first exhibition book features the pick of that pack, oftentimes delightfully as they were in their youth.
Turn the page, and you may meet a lank, t-shirt wearing, full-head-o'-hair Truman Capote seated on a park bench, one arm behind the iron filigree of the back rest, the other elbow pressed tight to his ribs, the curled hand tentatively forward like a cat's paw. Truly, he looks about 20 years old.
Similarly vital, young, glowing from the inside out and flamboyant with a wool coat draped over her shoulders, her legs crossed, her left hand crossed over her right wrist, the hand comfortably, familiarly holding a lit cigarette: Susan Sontag, her characteristic patch of gray like a broad feather on the right side of her layered shock of a haircut.
Never to grow old and seldom seen so prim beneath her black hair net, her blond eyebrows arched, her eyes averted, wistful: Marilyn.
The others, among so many names I may not recognized, are the many I have and have listed. They were and may always be remembered as leaders of the intelligentsia of their day: Carl Jung, Igor Stravinsky, Albert Camus, Alfred Stieglitz, Simone de Beauvoir (also portrayed still young, possibly her 30's), Jean-Paul Sartre, and so on.
Were you raised in cosmopolitan and genteel post-WWII fashion with books in the house and good museums within reasonable driving distance, or if you otherwise made the journey to any of the several great culture and art centers of the world, you came to know these people through their works. Seeing them in photographs, and many I have seen many times elsewhere, seems always like spending a few moments with old friends.
It's good to see the artist, philosopher, musician, writer, politician just as he or she was back in the day and with such as Capote and Sontag, perhaps even a day or two earlier than that.
Writers by Nancy Crampton
Nancy Crampton may need a little bit of an introduction. Her publisher, Quantuck Lane Press, bills her as the "official photographer of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y." [3] From the duo-tone opener of an ever dapper Isaac Bashevis Singer to the animated, lively dozen of an end with Studs Terkel, Writers puts a face, often a familiar one--Crampton has carved out a niche providing authors' photographs for book jackets , on familiar company.
In Writers, the portraits are far less obtuse than the Cartier-Bresson consciously unselfconscious candids. Albert Murray looks at you right through the camera's lens and smiles.
Then again, John Updike doesn't look at your or look away. He sits at his typing table and types--a framed portrait of the writer and his daughter provides the face.
Alfred Kazin, Anne Sexton, and Maurice Sendak, however, do look right at the lens and express themselves through their eyes, not every shot, but most. They're accessible.
If you're a reader in the not so old 19th and 20th Century traditions--i.e., someone who likes a good book and has or takes the time to read at length--you know their names. About 140 literary personalities grace this volume, and would there were prints, frames, and wall space enough in every library for all of them. Lacking that, the book will have to do.
1. Cartier-Bresson, Henri. An Inner Silence: The Portraits of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Agnes Sire, Foreword; Jean-Luc Nancy, Introduction. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2006.
2. Crampton, Nancy. Writers. Foreword by Mark Strand. First Edition. New York: The Quantuck Lane Press, 2005.
3. "Writers: Nancy Crampton." The Quantuck Lane Press.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
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