In Robin Laurence’s review of the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition at the West Vancouver Museum, she writes, “Henri Cartier-Bresson pioneered an approach to his medium that is known as ”˜the decisive moment’. Not for him the large-scale, theory-referenced, and carefully staged photos that have come to dominate the international art scene.”

Of course this is correct because the option of “large-scale, theory-referenced, and carefully staged photos” would not have been available to Cartier-Bresson when he began working in the ’30s any more than pop art silk-screens would have been an option for Michelangelo.

Although there have been experiments with photo murals since the beginning of photography, the type of work that Laurence is undoubtedly referring to was pioneered by artists around the world in the 1970s and is continued today by Vancouver artists such as Stan Douglas, Jin-me Yoon, and Rodney Graham. It is more likely that if Cartier-Bresson was rejecting anything it might have been the fuzzy artiness of the Pictorialist school of photography. However, I have always imagined that he was only positively driven by his delight in the new Leica camera’s ability to arrest the world in action. From what I have read about Cartier-Bresson, he was a happy person—not a hater; I doubt that he needed to define himself through opposition to others.

> Roy Arden / Vancouver