“I owe an allegiance to Surrealism,” Henri Cartier-Bresson wrote, “because it taught me to let the photographic lens look into the rubble of the unconscious and of chance.”

“Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Scrapbook: Photographs, 1932–46,” which opened last week at the International Center of Photography, features more than 300 pictures in which the young photographer explored “the rubble of the unconscious and of chance.” The source is a scrapbook of his work that he prepared to help the curators of a 1947 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. He went through his files in Paris and personally made prints of the images he though should be considered for the exhibition; when he got to New York, he bought a scrapbook and meticulously mounted them in chronological order. After the MoMA show he forgot the scrapbook for 50 years, but rediscovered it in the 1990s, at which time he demounted most of the pictures. The show at ICP includes the demounted pictures and the few scrapbook pages that are still covered with prints.

That Cartier-Bresson was one of the great artists of the 20th century needs no rehearsal here. And many of the images in this exhibition are among his best and most famous, which means they are among the best and most famous photographic images of all time. But Cartier-Bresson’s genius was with his camera in the streets, not in the darkroom with an enlarger, timer, and trays of chemicals. He almost never did his own darkroom work, but relied on trusted lab technicians to get from his negatives the prints he wanted. The prints he made himself for the scrapbook are about 4 inches by 6 inches, somewhat sepia in coloration, with a narrow tonal scale: They are, in fact, a little hard to make out.

These scrapbook prints were not made for display. The show at ICP includes several of the larger prints — they look about 9 inches by 13 inches — that were printed especially for the 1947 MoMA exhibition. They are not only larger, but have an extended tonal range, and looking at them one can fully appreciate Cartier-Bresson’s achievement. The scrapbook prints, though, are of interest not just as historical artifacts, but also for the insight they afford into Cartier-Bresson’s working habits. It is like visiting a painter in his studio, and seeing his sketches, as well as his finished works.

There is a page from the scrapbook with eight pictures of Henri Matisse, the four in the left column all horizontal, the four in the right column vertical; you would have to rotate the page 90% to look at them properly. The picture at the top of the left column is the very well known image of Matisse holding a white dove he is sketching. He occupies only the lower left corner of the frame, and a birdcage with three white doves on it takes up all the right-hand half. It fulfills Cartier-Bresson’s dictum that “composition must have its own inevitability about it.”

The other pictures are all interesting enough but, as Cartier-Bresson told Dorothy Norman in 1946, “If one photographs people, it is their inner look that must be reflected. One must reveal what goes on inside them, as well as their relation to the outer world.” Somehow this shows us Matisse in that way.

There are three pictures from Seville, Spain (1933), of the ragtag gaggle of young boys, one on crutches, playing in the ruins of some demolished buildings. Two are shot through a hole in a wall, one is not. The children move about, sometimes ignoring the camera, sometimes mugging for it. Cartier-Bresson shifts about exploring the possibilities until the laughing children and the rubble are in just the right relationship. “We photographers deal in things that are continually vanishing,” he later wrote, but for those who know the image, the children are still there, their antics a retort to the destructive impulses of adults. It is well known that Cartier-Bresson always had his pictures printed full frame, that is, without cropping. To be able to compose the pictures exactly as he wanted, and trip the shutter at the “decisive moment,” took great skill. So it was a genuine shock to learn that two of the pictures on view here were in fact cropped, and one of them was “Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris, France” (1932), a picture of a plump man leaping over a puddle. An obstructive fence was cropped from the left side of the negative.

It was a wonder to see the alternate takes from the arena in Valencia, Spain, that produced the surreal 1933 image of the bullring attendant whose left eyeglass lens is a white circle. The series of half a dozen pictures of the prostitutes in Alicante, Spain (1933), make clear that Cartier-Bresson established a relationship with them, and that they were comfortable with him there. He said that what he was looking for, above all else, was to be “attentive to life,” and here he paid attention until he had what he wanted.

When the MoMA show opened in 1947, Lincoln Kirstein wrote in the New York Times Magazine about Cartier-Bresson’s “skillful, informed, and highly intelligent eye.” He praised the pictures for their “impersonal, disciplined integrity.” The exhibition of the scrapbook at ICP gives us insight into how the master did it.

wmeyers@nysun.com

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