The Making of “Henri Cartier-Bresson: China 1948-1949, 1958”¹

Curatorial Background

After launching a photographically illustrated magazine called “NEUF” in 1950, Robert Delpire (1926-2017) founded a publishing house in Paris under his own name in 1953 and published his first book in same year.² In 1954, at the age of 28, he edited and published D’une Chine à l’autre (published in English as From One China to the Other, 1956), a collection of photographs taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) in China between 1948 and 1949. (Figure 1) Delpire and Cartier-Bresson became close friends after that. By 2003, Delpire had published several special collections of Cartier-Bresson's photographs and curated many major exhibitions for him, including his last retrospective at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

The preface to D’une Chine à l’autre was written by Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the most renowned French philosophers of his time, a master of existentialism and a Marxist, while the introduction and photo descriptions were penned by Cartier-Bresson himself. The book contains 144 photographs of excellent image quality made possible by the photogravure process. Compared to the style of design at the time, the page layout is very "modern"—the main focus is on the presentation of the photographs, supplemented by a simple commentary, various sizes of images and the relationship between images create different narratives and dialogues.

“The book is a journal of the entire trip to China, above all, a journal made of images by a photo reporter.”³ For Cartier-Bresson, the book is an observational study of Chinese society in 1949 without a specific political perspective. On the trip he witnessed social changes during the civil war and after the establishment of the communist regime. In the book he presented them under five headings: “The Celestial Empire” (Le Céleste Empire), “The Course of Events” (Le cours des événements), “The Last Days” (Les derniers jours), “Interregnum” (L'interrègne), and “The Succession” (La relève).

It is this book that gave Michel Frizot and me the idea of the exhibition Henri Cartier-Bresson: China 1948-1949, 1958. About eight years ago, Michel Frizot showed me this volume of photographs in his study, thinking that the theme should be of interest to me as a Taiwanese. I was immediately drawn to the subject matter and the images themselves. Upon further inquiries, I found that the images had not been seriously discussed in 1948 and 1949, even after the book was completed in 1954. In his subsequent retrospectives Cartier-Bresson often exhibited only a few of them. Thus, via Michel Frizot’s connection with the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, the two of us proposed this exhibition.

The Archive

In 2017, we finally confirmed the exhibition plan after the proposal and the initial research. The first thing we did was to find out how many images and documents related to this theme were available at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation. We both thought that even if the Foundation had kept the relevant files, they would be few. However, when we first saw them all, we were shocked. On the table there were five boxes of original photographs, two large stacks of magazines, two thick volumes of contact sheets, and five folders of loose-leaf typed notes. The contact sheets alone represented 162 rolls of film (numbered by Cartier-Bresson at the time when the photos were taken). Since each roll contains 36 negatives, there should be more than 5,800 of them in total. It is impossible to determine how many photographs were selected and printed by Magnum Photos, but the Foundation preserved more than 500. For the 162 contact sheets, each roll of film was accompanied by one to two notes, for a total of 200 pages of notes. (Figure 2) In addition, there were 160 pages of related material, including letters sent from China to his parents, business correspondence, and telexes. Lastly, there were 50 printed copies of media coverage on Cartier-Bresson in 1948 and 1949, including 340 published photographs by Cartier-Bresson.

To be honest, we were not only surprised but also confused when we saw these resources, because normally photography would not involve such a large number of documents. Even in the case of Cartier-Bresson, it is only during his stay in China that he kept such a number of records. We deduced that this might be related to the condition in which Cartier-Bresson lived during this period. At that time, Cartier-Bresson was used to buying cans of 100 meters of film at a time and cut them into single rolls of negatives by himself. In China, he was not able to develop the photos on site due to time and equipment constraints. Therefore, after finishing each roll, he would number it and leave half page to two pages of notes to briefly explain the scenes and events in it. The notes were generated with the help of his wife Ratna Mohini or sometimes friends and guides, such as Jim Burke (Beijing) and Sam Tata (Shanghai), and then typed and sent back to Magnum Photos in New York. They are usually overviews, personal observations, or information about a particular series of images. Based on these narratives and information, Magnum Photos then wrote captions of two to three lines after selecting the images from the contact sheets. So not only did Cartier-Bresson not see the photos he had taken, he also did not know the editorial choices. Because he was in China, he only learned about them when the reports were published, and he often saw them months later than other people. For instance, it was not until May 1949 in Shanghai that he read the Life magazine report on Beijing.

After our initial review of the archival material, Michel Frizot and I started the process of sorting, numbering and digitizing. The first step was to sort and number more than 500 photos and to select about 150 of them for the exhibition. We noticed changes in Cartier-Bresson’s workload and the number of photos while working with the archive. For example, he took about 900 photographs in ten days in Beijing in December 1948, and Life magazine selected more than 200 of them. Twenty-six photos made their way into the final published reports. This means among the 500 prints, many of the photographs were never exhibited nor reproduced in magazines or books. This revelation highlights the critical role of archives and the need for research.

Cartier-Bresson's Trip to China

Born into a wealthy manufacturer’s family, Cartier-Bresson aspired to be a painter and socialized with some surrealist artists in Paris until the 1930s when he encountered photography and began to take a lot of pictures. However, he was often regarded as a surrealist photographer rather than a photojournalist. He was captured and imprisoned by the Germans in World War II. After the war, he and his friends Robert Capa (1913-1954) and David Seymour (alias Chim, 1911-1956) founded Magnum Photos (May 1947). They created a work model that allowed independent photographers to work without restrictions from any press and to choose their own subjects.

At the time, Magnum Photos was starting out and allocating work regions. Cartier-Bresson chose to work in Asia, with the decolonization of Asian countries as his main focus. The choice might also be related to the fact that his wife, Ratna Mohini, was an Indonesian dancer. They settled in India from December 1947 to September 1948. In late 1948, despite its anti-communist tendency, Life magazine realized that the Kuomintang was about to be defeated on the mainland and wanted to have some images from perspectives different to those of the magazine's previous reports on the Chinese civil war. It commissioned Cartier-Bresson, then based in Burma, to fly to Beijing to record the last days of the Kuomintang. Cartier-Bresson received the commission, telexed to him from Magnum,⁴ and arrived in Beijing on December 3. After staying in Beijing for 10 days, the arrival of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) caused Cartier-Bresson to move to Shanghai. We found a lot of details in the archive that had not been revealed before in discussions and biographies. For example, the three pages of telexes that Life sent to Magnum Photos in those years, which appeared for the first time in this exhibition. (Figure 3) It shows that the magazine had laid out the subjects and themes for Cartier-Bresson in detail from the very beginning. “... [show content that] shaped entire Chinese culture and character. Want to show human angle of city also of China’s finest scholars, merchants, opera lovers, bankers, bird fanciers, jade cravers, rug weavers, gourmets, artists, furniture makers, cloisonne craftsmen, restauranteurs, students, rickshaw boys, servants, camel train drivers, temple guides and their emotions and actions on momentous eve of Chinese history. Important capture human feeling in pix. You should look into little side streets, visit shopkeepers, and investigate what problems crisis has brought to bird fanciers and where little factories...”⁵ We can almost always find these requested images in the Life article of January 1949, “A Last Look at Peiping”, or in the Foundation's contact sheets.

From April to June 1949, Cartier-Bresson filmed the PLA entering the city of Nanjing, then returned to Shanghai and stayed there until September, before boarding the last ship to Hong Kong on the 23rd, ending his first 10-month trip to China (including his stop in Hong Kong). This trip to China was very important to Cartier-Bresson's photography career. After he finished taking photos of Beijing, he sent all the rolls back to the Magnum Photos office in New York. Eventually Life magazine selected 26 photos for a special report (A Last Look at Peiping) in January 1949, which created a sensation and made him famous.⁶ After leaving China, Cartier-Bresson did not return to France immediately, but continued to travel and take photos with his wife in Indonesia, Bali, Sri Lanka, then India and other countries on their way back to France. Meanwhile, his photographs of China kept on appearing in different Western publications. By the time he returned to France in 1950, he had become one of best-known photo reporters in the world.

“China Reportage” is neither traditional reportage photography, nor a series of organized or improvised stories. It is even difficult to define it in terms of reportage photography. There are no correlations or narrative links between the photographs. Cartier-Bresson tried to propose the idea that each photograph had its own structure and organization of forms. Whether for Cartier-Bresson, Life magazine or the history of reportage photography, the China series is extremely important. It created a brand-new way of doing reportage photography that was completely different from other photographers. Instead of focusing on events, the images are more poetic, more transcendent, more humanistic and personal. Charged with emotions, they do not fall short of good composition and balance. They are independent and complementary images that blend together on the magazine pages.

Whether in China or elsewhere, what mattered most to Cartier-Bresson was “human beings”—where they lived and how they lived. When asked in 1951, “What is the most important subject for you?” he replied, “Human beings. Human beings and their lives, so short, so fragile, so threatened.”⁷

Sequencing Images

To sequence images for the exhibition, we combined images of related events and accompanied them with the notes left by Cartier-Bresson. (Figure 4) Since the photographs were originally intended to be used for reporting, they are not created as isolated images. Accompanying and juxtaposing them with the corresponding notes and contact sheets could help reconstruct the events presented in them. The process of sequencing helped us understand more about Cartier-Bresson's photographical journey. By arranging the related prints and documents of the same topic, we could learn the context of a particular photograph through the consecutive yet independent shots.

Another purpose of sequencing images was to release photographs that had never been shown to the public. Initially, the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation did not have intention to present photographs in the archive that Cartier-Bresson himself had not originally selected. But for researchers, they were the source of information and references for understanding Cartier-Bresson's conception of photo-reportage. Gold Rush is a good example. Anyone who has ever taken a picture with a film camera knows that a roll of 35mm negatives usually consists of 36 exposures, occasionally a 37th exposure, which depends on luck. The famous photo Gold Rush is the 37th exposure, but it is not clearly related to the previous shots on the same day. (Figure 5) By studying the archive, we found that the notes Cartier-Bresson sent back to New York did not mention this photo at all, which means he was probably unsure or unaware that he had taken it at the time. Take for example another contact sheet, in which a beggar in front of a shop window. (Figure 6) In the contact sheet, we could find three pictures of the same scene. Eventually, Cartier-Bresson chose the one in which the subject cast his eyes in a rather peculiar way, more expressive and efficient. The line of sight is often an important element in Cartier-Bresson's photographs. These two examples illustrate the value of contact sheets in understanding photography.

Sequencing images also includes the re-comparing of images and notes. By identifying, comparing, and tabulating images and notes related to our selected photographs from hundreds of pages of original records, we had the opportunity to re-examine old photo descriptions. For example, the photo of the man in a magua (Manchu style jacket for men) standing by the city wall. In the 1954 photo album and in later selections, it was identified as a former eunuch of the Qing Dynasty. (Figure 7) But going back in the archive, we found that the original note read: “an impotent (according to our pedicab) who by profession carries bride in their palanquin.” Another example is the photograph Gold Rush on the 37th negative. Cartier-Bresson initially did not write anything about it in its notes. All we know for sure is that it was the last photo he took on the afternoon of December 23^rd but Magnum Photos later added a lot of notes to it (see above).⁸

After comparing notes, we restored many of the imaginative and potentially questionable photo descriptions that were added later to their original more neutral titles. This process also extended to the reinterpretation of newspaper coverage. Tracing the “Gold Rush” photo to its original publications, a title reads: ‘Imagine the rout from China’. ‘The fight for the last chance. The crowd, terror-stricken, is trying to get permission to take the last train.’（Noir et Blanc magazine, 2 February 1949）It is obvious that the scene and event in the photo were misinterpreted.

In addition to providing a faithful reflection of the historical moments when the photos were taken, sequencing images also made it possible for Michel Frizot and me to create a parallel chronology of the Chinese civil war and Cartier-Bresson’s footprints in China in our book Henri-Cartier Bresson: China 1948-1949,1958 (2019). Through the chronology, we did not intend to highlight the military or political events of the civil war, but to obtain a clearer idea of the scenes of events that Cartier-Bresson probably heard about or witnessed – or not witnessed – in China at that time, and thus to understand the content of his photography and its historical context.

Finally, when it came to the presentation of the exhibition, for both curators, there was no better way than presenting it chronologically. Any other way would probably highlight the artistic or other aspects of Cartier-Bresson’s photography and nullify the exhibition’s purpose of showing “Cartier-Bresson's ten months of photographic work in China.” We chose to present this way, to a certain extent, in order to respond to the question “What is reportage photography?” According to Cartier-Bresson, who preferred taking isolated shooting rather than developing a whole “photojournalistic story.” The most important thing is to let these photos return to their original time and space.

In addition, we decided to present both the original photographs and the magazine at the time in the exhibition. Unlike a magazine, each issue of which is perhaps browsed by millions of people, original photographs are usually seen by only a few (through exhibitions or checked out with the permission of the foundation). Such a presentation was also meant to remind the world: where did photography come from? Having focused on the presentation and meanings of images in newspapers and magazines for almost 35 years, Michel emphasizes that, “In the past, the so-called reportage photography or magazines were not included in the history of photography. The purpose of these photographs was to be published in magazines. Without the medium, they would not have come into being.” Preserving the photographic images, magazines can be considered archival databases of photographers. The exhibition at Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1996 made him the first curator to present magazines as the main subject of an exhibition. ⁹ The fact that historical research of photography earlier and at that time did not cover magazines, by itself, is well worth reflecting on in the study of photography.

Notes