Cartier-Bresson’s symbolic theory is the decisive moment theory, which he explained in an interview with Washington Post in 1957, “there is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.” According to John Szarkowski, “the thing that happens at the decisive moment is not a dramatic climax but a visual one. The result is not a story but a picture.” (Szarkowski, 1966) Cartier-Bresson, in this sense, is not a story-teller, but a record-taker. And he only recorded things as he found them, no unnatural clarity, no exaggerated importance, no posed figures.
Cartier-Bresson took portraits of many celebrities; and many of the photographs were improvisations instead of posed pictures. He liked to catch the expression and emotion without the subject’s self-consciousness. That made him able to capture the real characters and personalities of his subjects, and reveal the unknown parts of those celebrities. Martin Luther King in his photograph was just like any of the busy, tired, attentive but a little bit confused clerks – we can see almost same facial expression on both the great political leader and the businessmen we meet every day in the subway. Pablo Picasso seemed to be a plain, familiar, neglectful old man, in the photograph of this excellent artist, almost no painting could be seen in obvious places. Another great artist, Henri Matisse, was also portrayed as an ordinary old gentleman who enjoyed staying with his pigeons, nothing in the photograph implied his wild, fevered style of fauvism. And Igor Stravinsky was shot at a careless moment which interestingly made contrast against his solemn image as an unrivalled musician. Pierre Curie and Marie Curie looked like a middle-aged couple living in our next door, tired, strained, nervous, even depressed. That image did not present the Curies as perfect as we have imagined; but it reminds us of their huge workload in their everyday life: without hard work, how could they achieve so much success and honor? Even geniuses are human; every human emotion can be found in Cartier-Bresson’s pictures, no matter how famous, glorious, important the subject he photographed was. When thinking of the celebrities he took picture of, we usually fall into stereotypes such as artists being weird, politicians being insidious, philosophers being painful, great men being forbidding…but after seeing Cartier-Bresson’s photographs, the false imagination disappear. We realize that every celebrity is still commonplace human being; they share commonplace happiness, sorrow, burdens, pleasures, annoyance just with every of us. Therefore, even in his photographs there is seldom any extremely strong feeling or drastic expression, we are still moved by those ordinary faces of extraordinary persons.
In this portrait of Marilyn Monroe, similarly, we see something in common with us in this legendary actress’s face. That is why this photograph becomes a classic in thousands of images of Marilyn Monroe: it is able to arouse compassion and empathy, not only stopping at admiration.
In everybody’s mind, Marilyn Monroe is a token of matchless beautifulness and sexiness. There may be a thousand different moments that are able to show her beauty to the audience; but this portrait is a special one, because Monroe is shown in a completely true moment of an unself-conscious, even absent-minded state. It means her beauty is a natural product, not created by make-ups and intentional expressions; even when she does not pay attention to the camera – in other words, not pay attention to what she herself looks like in others’ eyes, she is still amazingly graceful and charming.
The light and dark zones are distributed in a balance in the whole picture. Of course Monroe is put in the highlight; but audience can easily notice that in the photograph there are several other faces. Bresson does not exclude those people from his frame, nor does he cover them in the darkness. Instead, he includes them and gives them comparatively much light, and their total area in the photograph is almost half and half with the area of the subject Monroe. It gives audience a sense that Marilyn Monroe is simply an actress at her workplace, not a lonely, narcissistic goddess in her own world without anybody else. Of course, in order not to distract audience’s attention from the main part, Bresson does not present those people in the background completely and clearly. But merely their existence in the photograph just properly gives us the hint: she is not an untouchable nymph following Artemis in the mysterious forest; she is the real person, actress Marilyn Monroe, doing her job and living her life.
In terms of composition, Bresson insists on his principle of geometry. The whole space of the photograph is divided by several straight lines; the subject is perfectly framed out and emphasized within the concise composition. As Bresson explained in The Decisive Moment, “if the shutter was released at the decisive moment, you have instinctively fixed a geometric pattern without which the photograph would have been both formless and lifeless.” What geometric patterns do in the sense of visual effectiveness is that they create a feeling of being closer to reality. When we see a picture with fine geometry, we tend to be more likely to believe what it tells us because the stable, balanced composition implies that we are looking at a product of real world, not an absurd, empty hallucination. The perfect perspective Bresson selects makes the image seemingly Marilyn Monroe is just sitting in front of us, so close as if we can touch her hair and read most tiny changes on her face.
To avoid the sense of distance and contain other elements in the composition, Bresson does not use a closer angle to amplify Monroe’s face. However, her expression is still recognizable enough. No laughing, no smiling, no amusing, no enticing, in this photograph Monroe looks only calm and mild, even a bit tired and bored, in a casual, relaxed state but still incomparably graceful. She is not looking at the camera, therefore, her seductiveness “is turned away from us, just as Marilyn Monroe has turned her gaze somewhere else…there is a certain weariness in the gaze, boredom perhaps, but there is an almost imperceptible shadow of smile on her lips, the suppression of a smile, the portent of melancholy.” (Jean-Luc Nancy, 2006) From her face we can feel quite complex mentality: she is serious-minded for her role play but also tired of her work; she does not pay much attention to her appearance but is still unconsciously confident of her own beauty; she enjoys this quiet, idle moment but knows it is only temporary and rare in her busy schedule…the psychological distance between Monroe and the audience is decreased at once, as the audience have discovered that Marilyn Monroe is just the same kind of people with them. Like us, Monroe has her own burdens, troubles, exhaustions and confusions. Bresson has done a great job in capturing the quick expression and revealing the hidden subtle emotions of his subject. One frozen moment instantly allows us to understand the super star’s inner world and begin to feel she is not that remote.
Bresson said himself in the preface of his The Decisive Moment, “the true portrait emphasizes neither the suave nor the grotesque, but reflects the personality.” Actually, movie stars like Marilyn Monroe are pitiful because everybody is familiar with their faces but nobody is familiar with their personalities. We are accustomed to Monroe’s beauty just like we are accustomed to the misery of war, disaster, poverty, disease and all other cruelty of fate. Our stereotypes have told us in advance what is expected to be seen in photographs. So we do not feel moved when seeing Monroe’s photographs of her charming smile and sexy body, just like we do not feel moved when seeing photographs describing the tragic scenes in the world. But once we see the real moods, emotions and characters of Monroe, and surprisingly find those moods, emotions and characters are of no difference with our own, it is just like wars and disasters happening in our hometown, poverty and disease torturing our own family, cruel fate suddenly coming to our life. Everything originally unrelated with us seems to have so close relationship that enough to arouse our strong compassion. We get moved because we suddenly discover that perfect goddess is actually experiencing the same human world with us.
“Above all, I look for an inner silence. I seek to translate the personality and not an expression.” said Bresson in an interview with Michel Guerrin, in Le Monde, 21 November 1991. The “inner silence” contains all the unspoken words in our hearts, which we understand at the first glance. That is why, though we have access to thousands of Monroe’s photographs, this silent, weary, melancholy Monroe is considered as most close to the real one. And we are just moved by this most real one, as we see our own spirits in her gaze.
From An Inner Silence: Portraits of Henri Cartier-Bresson, p145
Marilyn Monroe
On the set of The Misfits, USA, 1960
Photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson
