Henri Cartier Bresson and Tacita

Henri Cartier Bresson and Tacita Dean

INTERVIEWER: We are going to start with the assumption that the reader has never been introduced to you or your art. Can you give us a little background information about you?

TACITA DEAN: I was born in 1965 in Canterbury England, and I attended Kent College in Canterbury. Art seems to run in my family, as my brother is an architect. I studied art quite seriously, attending Falmouth School of Art and studying for a Masters degree at the Slade School of Fine Art. In 2000, I was awarded a scholarship to study in Berlin, and I have lived in Berlin since that time.

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON: I was born in 1908 in Chanteloup-en-Brie, Seine-et-Marne, France. My father was a textile merchant, and my mother came from a wealthy family. Because of them, I had the financial freedom to pursue my art. They also encouraged art from an early age. I had a camera when I was a child and used it to take holiday snapshots, however I was not committed to photography at that time. I knew I wanted to do something artistic, but I dabbled around before settling on photography. I studied music and oil painting. In fact, my formal artistic training was as a painter, and I consider those early lessons essential to my later success as a photographer. Much of my younger years were spent as people imagine an artist should live. I had a grand affair with a married woman, with her husband's knowledge and consent. I lived in French Colonial Africa, and I had the financial freedom to dabble in art. However, my life of leisure ended in World War II. I joined the French army, and I spent almost three years as a prisoner of war in a Nazi camp. I was able to escape and return to France, where I worked as part of the Underground resistance. This real life experience led me to the realization that I had to capture reality in my work. After that, I spent much of my professional and personal life traveling and documenting world events.

INTERVIEWER: Why do you think that the two of you are featured in the same room at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art?

TACITA DEAN: I think we are featured in the same room at the SF MOMA because they happen to be exhibiting black and white photographs, and both of us have black and white photographs on display at that museum. While, like any modern artist working in film or photography, I have great respect for Cartier-Bresson's work, I do not think that our types of work can really be associated together other than under the general umbrella of photography. Take, for example, my work 'Beauty,' pictured below.

Tacita Dean: 'Beauty': Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, 2006. Gouache on gelatin silver print mounted on paper.

In 'Beauty,' I took a photo of a tree in the English countryside, and then put a chalky white gouache on the background of the photograph. Only the tree is not impacted by this application of the gouache, so that it stands out in stark relief against the background. This is not the realistic photography favored by Cartier-Bresson, but the use of photography as another form of media in the creation of an imaginative piece of art.

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON: Of course, I think that the reason that we are featured in the same room is because they are featuring our photography in the exhibit. However, I think we might actually have more in common, as artists, than Tacita imagines. My work has focused on very realistic photography, and it would be simple to suggest that I am simply capturing daily life. However, what is art if it is not capturing the beauty in daily life? One of my most famous photographs and one that is featured at SF MOMA is 'Behind the Gare St. Lazare.' It features the image of a man running over a wet surface, workers in the background. It is one of my favorites because it captures that feeling of the morning rush to get to work. The beauty in that image is not necessarily because it depicts something uniquely beautiful, but because it depicts something so common. All people rush to get places; it is one of the unifying elements of humanity, and I think that art that depicts those types of elements is beautiful, regardless of the medium.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: 'Behind the Gare Saint Lazare': Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, 1932.

INTERVIEWER: With what mediums do you to prefer to work?

TACITA DEAN: I think most people associate me with 16mm film, and think of me as a movie artist, because of my work in slow film. With film, soundtracks become an indispensible part of the work. However, I am hesitant to label myself under any particular genre. I think of art as more encompassing than just a single form of media. In addition to film, I use drawing, photography, sound, and writing to create my art. I employ other artists, most notably the cinematographers John Adderley and Jamie Cairney, to help create my art.

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON: I am most well-known for working in photography. My preferred camera was a 50mm Leica. However, I also did some work in cinematography.

INTERVIEWER: Both of you have traveled from your homelands, to some extent. How do you feel that travel has influenced you as an artist?

TACITA DEAN: I have been placed into the group of people referred to as YBA, or young British artists (Bush, 2004). I find this label interesting, because I do not tend to focus on British subjects in my art, and really have not lived in Britain for most of my creative and productive career. I think I have gotten that label because I am youngish and British. However, I think that I needed to travel outside of Great Britain to escape the idea of the YBA movement. I am not interested in presenting pop culture in an avante garde way, like many of my YBA contemporaries. I like presenting beautiful objects, maybe not in the traditionally beautiful ways that people might associate with those objects, but I like beauty. Interestingly enough, with 'Beauty' and other photographs from that series, I was capturing the English countryside, but I needed a non-British perspective to reveal what I wanted to show in those photographs.

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON: Had I not traveled when I was young, I would not have been introduced to the Surrealists, and they greatly influenced my art and my approach to art. So, those early travels certainly impacted how I approach trying to capture images; they influenced the style of my art. However, it was my later travels that really influenced me as an artist. It is one thing to talk about life when you're a young kid from a privileged family, which is what I was. It is something else entirely to talk about life and try to represent what it meaningful in life when you have been close to losing that life. Seeing other people in desperate circumstances, brought my attention to the things that people consider the most meaningful and powerful, and, as an artist, I tried to capture those things. The big things in life so frequently turned out to be the small and seemingly meaningless things that we all take for granted.

INTERVIEWER: Other than the fact that you are both photographers, do you see any other common, uniting elements in your work?

TACITA DEAN: Well, I think that anyone growing up in post World War II Europe has to view World War II as a unifying element. Cartier-Bresson was held prisoner in a Nazi camp, and I choose to live in Germany and focus much of my artistic attention on German culture and architecture. The impact that Germany has had on the whole of Europe is fantastically out of proportion to the size of Germany in relation to the rest of Europe. First, Germany had a huge impact with World War I, and then Europe retaliated against Germany with a vengeance, helping set the stage for World War II. Though I was not around to live through bombings or anything like that, there is still so much attention and thought given to the possible threat that Germany could be to the rest of Europe. How can such a relatively small country pose such a great threat to the whole of Europe, especially when you consider Great Britain and its legacy as once having an empire that spanned the globe? That made me very interested, not only in German culture and what makes it unique, but also in how that culture impacts and is impacted by the rest of Europe. So, culturally, I would say that we share the same influence.

Artistically, as I said before, I think that anyone who uses photography as a medium has to recognize that Cartier-Bresson represents the gold standard in what a photographer can do. However, I think we also share the common elements of having been very highly-trained as artists. Both of us studied art extensively, and did not limit ourselves to filmography or photography in our studies. Therefore, we share a very solid classical artistic background, and I think that comes through in the strength of our works, even though we approach our work with a very different style.

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON: Tacita is absolutely right about a shared cultural impact. World War II changed the face of Europe. However, it was not only Europe that was impacted by World War II, but literally the entire world. The Holocaust was not the first time something atrocious had occurred, but it was the first time there was a genuine threat that someone like Hitler could rule the world. It was also a moment of striking shame for so much of the world. So many countries tried an appeasement approach, ignoring the horrors of what Hitler was doing. Other countries, like France, were defeated and occupied, forced to become complicit in what Hitler was doing. Living through that experience made it critical to me to travel and expose newsworthy items. Some of my most memorable photographs were of Gandhi before he was assassinated and at his funeral. Here was a huge movement, led by a seemingly inconsequential man. To capture on film who and what Gandhi was is something a photographer can only hope to do once in a lifetime.