Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: Two issues of Paris Match and the book Moscou vu par Henri Cartier-Bresson feature some of the photographer’s most striking reportages, made during a visit to the Soviet Union. That the trip in question took place in 1954, a few weeks after Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir traveled to the USSR themselves, is not completely fortuitous. At the time, an apparent convergence of political history, the history of photojournalism, and the history of ideas resulted in a kind of cross-collaboration between the figures of the writer/public intellectual and the artist/photographer. Generic and axiological conditions coalesced around the literary genre of the travelogue in the Soviet Union and Sartre’s idea of the responsibility of the writer confronting his times. From that standpoint, a reporter or photographer had to be more than a visual witness: a full participant in the debates on history and a full-fledged intellectual figure, without, at the same time, ever ceasing to be an artist. Was Cartier-Bresson a privileged protagonist in this convergence?
Source: OpenEdition (OpenEdition)
Author: Jean-Pierre Montier
Language: French
Topic: Photographic and Visual Arts
Subfield: Museology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W130706249