foam magazine #17 / portrait? On My Mind...
The Berlin Wall, 1962 © Henri Cartier-Bresson/ Magnum Photos/HH
Nicci Gerrard I love the way that Henri Cartier-Bresson takes a fragile moment – the wobble of a bicycle, a figure crossing the street, a couple exchanging a kiss in a café – and confers his extraordinary artistry and geometry on it, without ever making it seem artificial; the way he sees shapes, pat terns, the fall of light on ruined squares and empty landscapes. He gives a heroic quality to life without removing its intimacy. I don’t have a fa vourite Cartier-Bresson (or at least, every one I look at becomes for that moment my favourite) and so I nearly chose his captivating On the banks of the Marne (France, 1938) simply because the two men and two women who are sitting by the river and eating a very French picnic – as we look, wine is glugging into a glass – makes me feel so very cheerful, and because the photograph has a painterly feel to it, it’s a bit like Georges Seurat’s La Grande Jatte. But in the end I’m choosing The Berlin Wall
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(Germany, 1962). The wall runs in a dogmatically straight line, slicing the photograph in two; on its top is the barbed wire; beyond that, just a few feet away, are the houses of West Germany. And on the nearside of the photograph four children are playing on the cracked and rutted pavings, their figures soft and mobile amid the grim grey architecture. It’s a freezeframe, the time arrested: a small girl walks towards us from the distance, a small boy squats, gazing intently at something we can’t make out; another boy stands, legs apart in his baggy shorts, with his jugged ears large under his cropped hair; a girl reaches up to climb the wall, the muscles in her bare legs taut – in her billowing dress, she looks like a ballet dancer. Photos always remind you of the time that has gone: the four children would be old by now, or dead; the world it evokes has passed. It’s such a tender, beautiful and poignant image. +