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OBJECTIF:
PARIS—Paris through the eyes of the most famous French
photographers—is the title of the exhibit at the Ayala
Museum that is ongoing until June 27, with the
cooperation of the Mairie de Paris and the Alliance
Française de Manille. A precious show, it shows how
Paris
was seen through the eyes of its great photographers,
including Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) and Eugene
Atget (1854-1927), who raised the medium of photography
into an art.
Cartier-Bresson was the first to be known as a
“photojournalist,” a term which is of widespread
currency today. To him is also attributed the concept of
the “decisive moment” in photography which refers to
that split-second instant in which image and form
(composition and tone) cohere together to create a
significant visual meaning. Cartier-Bresson traveled
around the world in order to be where the action was.
Aside from documenting the Nazi occupation of Paris and
the later triumphal march of the victorious forces in
Paris, he was also in
Peking
when the People’s Republic of China was declared in
1950. He pursued his photographic career in the midst of
the great events in history. He captured the highs and
lows of
Paris, from the panoramic perspective taken from the Notre
Dame Cathedral to small street scenes. At the same time,
he also had an eye for the oblique, off-center view, the
small epiphanies of everyday life, as in the solitary
man jumping over a puddle in a quiet moment behind the
grinding locomotives of the Gare St. Lazare.
Cartier-Bresson, who worked with a Leica camera,
established the Magnum Photographic Agency in 1947.
In
contrast, the photographer Eugene Atget is described as
a recluse who confined himself to Paris, exploring all
its corners and surprises with his large-format wooden
bellows camera. He must have covered all the streets of
Paris in all seasons, from its chimneys to its shop windows.
There is a particular series of windows of the city done
by several artists, all reflecting the distinct
personalities of their inhabitants, from quaint to
orthodox, sometimes bringing out contrasts between
indoors and outdoors, with each proceeding from a
singular and pure consciousness born, nevertheless, of
the place.
The
photographic prints gathered mainly from the first half
of the 20th century are necessarily in black-and-white,
which was the available film technology of the period.
And, as the photographs show, the black-and-white images
were quite suitable to the experience of exploring and
reflecting on the city, as though one moved through
layers of tone from dark to gray to light in tree-lined
roads, while the fine silhouettes of branches and leaves
formed a tracery on the upper field of vision. Textures
played a part in all these—the texture of stone mainly,
in the massive gray walls of Notre Dame and the ravelins
of the bridges down the
Seine.
Medieval
Paris was a maze of twisting houses, rundown apartments
and muddy streets but these gave way to massive city
planning in 1852, when Emperor Louis-Napoleon III
commissioned Baron George-Eugene Haussmann to rebuild
Paris. The old city underwent a radical upheaval when most
of it was sacrificed to build a rational system of grand
boulevards radiating from a city center. This urban
scheme, likewise, influenced the course of history when
it was used to suppress Parisian uprisings, such as the
Paris Commune, by the efficiency with which the royal
troops could now deal with them. The king’s highway led
directly from the
Palace
of Versailles to any flashpoint in the city—a concrete
expression of royal centralization and control.
This
city planning, however, had its good historic moments
captured in photography, as when, after the Second World
War, Charles de Gaulle led the French armies in a
triumphal procession through the avenue of the Arc de
Triomple surrounded by euphoric crowds (a scene captured
in the film Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart and
Ingrid Bergman). This, in fact, was the acme of the
French mystique, marked by many songs and poems of the
war and resistance and collaboration (even the songs of
famed chanteuse Edith Piaf are deceptively patriotic but
one of her most romantic has an undeniable
collaborationist content playing to Aryan values—“I
would dye my hair blonde for you”). Love songs and
accordion music always form part of the mystique of
Paris, full of references to carousels, the organ
grinder and his monkey or cat, outdoor cafés, chestnut
streets in images steeped in a postwar nostalgia and
romantic melancholy.
The
decade of the ’60s saw another renovation of Paris under
Charles de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture Andre Malraux,
who ordered all the buildings of the city to be scrubbed
of all grime and soot and restored to their original
resplendent condition. Another milestone of the city’s
history was the building of the glass pyramid of the
Louvre in 1989 by the Chinese-born, US-educated
architect I.M. Pei. From here, one then goes to the
contemporary period when the postmodern
Pompidou
Center,
defying all previous styles, was built in the ’70s, and
black-and-white film turns into color Ektachrome with
miles and miles of bathers, sun-worshippers with the
flimsiest of clothes, basking in the sun on a French
beach.
This
exhibit of photographs is like a tour of France,
historically as well as geographically. But it does not
confine itself to the grand boulevards and the ringing
moments of history; it also gives us a glimpse of the
underside of the city, as well as its more intimate
views which may hold personal memories lived or
imagined. For this, we thank the great photographers who
have preserved these visual mementos for our generation. |
