In 1962, Henri Cartier-Bresson and American architectural photographer Ezra Stoller were commissioned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston to photograph historic buildings in Galveston, Texas. In this photograph, the elegant bay window is partly obscured by a tree branch. The artist focuses on the grand but decaying staircase and the young girl playing on the steps.
According to the commission, Cartier-Bresson was charged with recording the details of the house’s large bay window. However, because the artist preferred photographing people, he focused on the animated figure of the young girl. As a result, the lines and textures of the historic house become a foil for the girl, the structure’s age and decay a contrast to her youthful energy. Cartier-Bresson used a small, hand-held camera that allowed him to move easily, capturing the life in and around buildings.
This photograph was included in a book titled The Galveston That Was, a project initiated by Houston architect Howard Barnstone and sponsored by the museum. Barnstone wrote the text and Cartier-Bresson and Ezra Stoller contributed the photographs. The book’s foreword acknowledges that the museum chose in Cartier-Bresson and Stoller “two pairs of eyes of such broadly different curiosity.” Stoller’s photographs are intelligent, informative, clear, direct, and technically majestic. Cartier-Bresson’s work is ultimately less concerned with the architectural significance of the buildings he was commissioned to photograph than with the way the buildings were used, and misused, by their current inhabitants. Unlike Stoller, who excluded all but the random passerby, Cartier-Bresson found people irresistible and included them in almost every picture.
Henri Cartier-Bresson was a noted photojournalist and a master of the “one unique picture whose composition possesses such vigor and richness, and whose content so radiates outward from it, that this single picture is a whole story in itself.”¹ His ability to recognize intuitively moments of significance in human events, and to give them graceful form, influenced a generation of photographers on both sides of the Atlantic.
1. Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), n.p.
