Henri Cartier Bresson en el año 1933. Sus viajes a España

Abstract

Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1933. Travels to Spain 1933 was a crucial year for the young photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (Chanteloup-en- Brie, 1908 – Montjustin, 2004). An indefatigable traveler since these years with his Leica, in 1933 he crossed the Spanish border twice, the first time in spring, no known order. He travelled through a large part of Spain and Northern Africa, returning afterwards to Madrid in autumn as correspondent of the Parisian magazine Vu. He was sent to cover as a photographer the legislative elections of the young Spanish Second Republic, the first in national history that secured voting rights for women. While during the previous year he had merely participated in a group exhibition and only a couple of his photographs had appeared in the French press, 1933 was a more fruitful year as he saw his photographs published in numerous magazines, newspapers and books, -with particular relevance of his report for Vu that Cartier always remembered as his first collaboration for illustrated publications- and he exhibited his images in collective exhibitions in Paris, Philadelphia and, especially, in his first retrospective exhibition organized by the photographer together with the art dealer Julien Levy in the latter’s New York gallery. At the end of the year, he also enjoyed his first European solo exhibition in the halls of the Madrid Athenaeum.The thirties have been considered by historiography as a brilliant period in the artistic development of the French photographer. However, from this initial stage in which Cartier-Bresson visited numerous African and European countries, including Spain, no detailed studies have been carried out. This doctoral thesis analyzes both trips to Spain in 1933 and meticulously classifies the numerous respective photographs, of which the not insignificant number of more than 800 negatives have been preserved in the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris, most of them unpublished. This research deals with the French way of operating during these years, retrieves many excellent shots that never left the darkroom and analyzes the efforts of the photographer in the years immediately following 1933 to make his way in the precarious photographic circuits of exhibitions and publications of the time, largely ignored by scholars. The work of atmospheric recovery carried out, allows to know several points of information for historians about the daily life of the photographer and his environment that we could call orbital, not insignificant in the face of the secrecy of these years in the decontextualized and dissociative work of Cartier-Bresson, always reluctant to include known references of the places he visits in his frames. In the young Spanish Republic under construction, he was seduced by the traditional environments and the resounding popular types offered by the neighboring nation, on which he fixed his Leica with poetic depth and geometric subtlety to which he often added a sense of social commitment; in his negatives, prostitutes, junkmen, gypsies, miserables, witchmen, hicks, novilleros, transvestites, pickpockets, street vendors, hustlers, mule drivers, rascals, bailaoras, porters, sandwichs boards, brats of all stripes are carefully fixed.