Indecisive Moments: Henri Cartier-Bresson and Helmut Newton

Cartier-Bresson famously defined the art of photography as mastering the decisive moment, wherein a broad human empathy trumps necessary but not by itself sufficient technical expertise as the key to significance. On the other hand, if Weegee infamously made a career on the celebrity mug shot, Helmut Newton defined his as the triumph of the muff shot. It is instructive to compare these two career trajectories by juxtaposing in one's mind's eye two simultaneous Berlin exhibitions, Cartier-Bresson at the Martin-Gropius-Bau near the Anhalter Bahnhof (ended August 18, 2004) with Newton's at the new Museum of Photography opposite the Zoo Bahnhof (indefinitely).

It is best to begin with a problem. Newton never saw a woman's pudendum that didn't turn him on. He notoriously even created a shot in which his photographer wife is portrayed as contemplating him and a muff contrived through the use of a huge mirror. That surely defines the indecisive moment of extreme manipulation.

Now it happens that the mons veneris has always seemed to me the most extraordinary and incendiary part of a woman's body. Over the years I grew to love the intimacy of nuzzling, sucking, and finally fucking such a glorious reality of the female anatomy. But after a recent forced march through a forests of Newton's muffled images, I wanted to cry, Muff, Enough Already.

Now, believe me, it takes a lot of muff to turn me off. The more I thought about my entirely unanticipated turn off, the more I saw that Newton was using the mons as a means not an end in itself. A means to establish himself as the most provocative because revealing photographer of his age. Trouble is, he has desecrated that nearly sacred object by exploiting it instrumentally.

His claim to fame was his honesty, like that other creator who assembles hundreds and hundreds of one-day nudists to motivate repetitive cliches about the glory of the human body, and how we shouldn't be ashamed of it. Alas, the cumulative effect of Newton's gallery of roguish bushes is to simulate the Cum shot come-ons I have to flush out of my e-mails every morning. Nude blond throwing up in a toilet, exposed muff. Nude lady for hire, looking terminally despondent. And so on, and so on. Until the eye blurs from excess of pseudo-compassion. Newton exploits the exposed pudendum, objectifying it, to his own greater glory. Well, I find his demi-monde of fashion designers, movie stars, and street walkers excruciatingly boring. All those indecisive moments.

Cartier-Bresson is an entirely different story. He achieves what Edward Steichen only tried to in his MOMA omni show (now on permanent display in a castle in Luxembourg, his birthplace): a comprehensive diachronic documentary of the human race, warts and wonders alike. He makes the most commonplace of human activities marvelously luminous. He makes you want to love the subjects of his loving clicks. Newton makes you merely want to consider fucking them. Time will tell which photographer will dominate the consciousness of the twenty-first century. For our sakes, I hope it's Henri rather than Helmut.