Stop being a Bresson renegade!

William Klein's death has exacerbated a certain hatred for Henri Cartier-Bresson

Mexico, State of Oaxaca, Tehuantepec, 1934.© Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos

I touched reading distancing myself from Bresson precisely because Klein was in a certain sense the anti-Bresson. Bresson's rigid academic schematism was in fact torn apart by Klein's blatant imperfection.

But it is in the history of photography that the killing of the father takes place anyway. In the past, I wrote that the concept of the decisive moment was something far out of date. I did it with full knowledge of the facts by studying the evolution of photography through its most representative authors. Stephen Shore's photography, for example, is a continuous denial of a decisive moment. Bresson's detractors also criticize the French master for having often worked with subjects aware of his presence, forgetting the fact that Bresson was never a street photographer. The work done in Scanno as in Mexico are the result of a typical reporter's approach. Even if Bresson had on his side an attention I would say obsessive with composition. Attention: a composition that is affected at every moment by his pictorial experience and in any case the daughter of the times in which the French master produced his work.

It may be that Bresson is not one of your favorite photographers. But without Bresson, the Klein would not have existed either. The opposite answer exists because before there was a proposal. And willy-nilly we are all Bresson's kids. Klein too. The Provoke Japanese experience is also part of the important points in the history of photography, heritage of all of us, even of those who are ignorant of Japanese photography. Who maybe take snapshots today without conscience or cultural bases.

So this post wants to be an invitation to a more mature attitude than photography as a whole. Evolution happens for everything. Accepting photography means taking the whole part of it and possibly studying it as much as possible, even in those episodes that we consider inappropriate or important.