TY - JOUR
T1 - On the metaphor and practice of photography: Socialist realism, the popular front in France and the dynamics of cultural unity
AU - Dell, Simon
PY - 2001/1
Y1 - 2001/1
N2 - On 30 April 1936 the Communist-supported photo-journal Regards published a sequence of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson (figure 1). These photographs are quite unlike the immaculately composed works for which Cartier-Bresson would later become famous; instead the images are seemingly quite casual. They are not made by seizing ‘decisive moments’. Indeed, for Cartier-Bresson the capturing of the ‘decisive moment’ would be -a question of working ‘in terms of reality, not of fiction’, whilst the photographs in Regards werederived from a fictional precedent: they were an accompaniment to a short feature on a novel by Tristan Rémy, Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
AB - On 30 April 1936 the Communist-supported photo-journal Regards published a sequence of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson (figure 1). These photographs are quite unlike the immaculately composed works for which Cartier-Bresson would later become famous; instead the images are seemingly quite casual. They are not made by seizing ‘decisive moments’. Indeed, for Cartier-Bresson the capturing of the ‘decisive moment’ would be -a question of working ‘in terms of reality, not of fiction’, whilst the photographs in Regards werederived from a fictional precedent: they were an accompaniment to a short feature on a novel by Tristan Rémy, Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
U2 - 10.1080/03087298.2001.10443436
DO - 10.1080/03087298.2001.10443436
M3 - Article
VL - 25
SP - 52
EP - 60
JO - History of Photography
JF - History of Photography
SN - 0308-7298
IS - 1
ER -