Behind the Gare St. Lazare

The lettering on the hoarding

A billboard stands against the railing at the left, and it is legible. The name RAILOWSKY is printed on it twice in heavy condensed capitals, once above the other, each line under a smaller line of type too small to read. The frame cuts the first letter of both lines.

The poster immediately to the right carries a figure rather than a word. A dark silhouette leaps with one leg thrown forward and both arms out, and the sheet has been torn in two down the middle, so the leap is split. A narrow strip of older poster survives on the post between the two, showing stacked capital As.

The water repeats all of it. RAILOWSKY reads backwards in the reflection, the torn leaper leaps again upside down, and the spearheads of the railing point down instead of up. Two leaping figures therefore stand in the frame before the man enters it, one printed and one reflected.

How it was made

Henri Cartier-Bresson bought his first Leica in Paris in 1932, the year of the photograph, and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson dates the purchase to that year in its chronology. The Leica was a 35mm rangefinder small enough to work in one hand and quick enough to use unnoticed. Neither the Museum of Modern Art's record nor the Foundation's chronology states which Leica body, which lens or which film stock produced this particular negative, and none is asserted here.

The exposure is legible in the print itself. The standing man behind the railing, the cart, the posters and the roofs are all sharp, while the leaping man's legs and arms are smeared and his hat is doubled. A shutter fast enough to hold the static parts of the yard was not fast enough to hold him, which is why he reads as motion and everything else reads as fact.

The left edge truncates the hoarding mid-letter, and the bottom edge cuts the reflection off before it finishes. The account that Henri Cartier-Bresson made the exposure through a gap in a boarded fence, and that the gap rather than a decision set the left edge, is repeated everywhere and is attributed to him. It appears in neither the Museum of Modern Art's object record nor the Foundation's published chronology, and it is reported here as an attributed account rather than a documented one.

The print is also evidence against the habit the photographer is best known for. He is routinely described as printing the whole negative with its black rebate showing, as proof that nothing was cut. The Museum of Modern Art's print carries no black border on any side.

Who made the print

The Museum of Modern Art dates its print to the 1950s, two decades after the negative. Henri Cartier-Bresson did not do his own darkroom work for most of his career, and the laboratory that did it is documented. Pierre Gassmann opened Pictorial Service in the 7th arrondissement of Paris in January 1950, with his wife France Gassmann on retouching and six enlarger stations around a single long row of tanks.

Picto, as the firm became, records that its first customers were friends and members of the young Magnum Photos agency. It names Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, David Seymour, William Klein, Willy Ronis, Robert Doisneau and Édouard Boubat among the photographers who got into the habit of lingering in the laboratory. They stayed to argue with the printers about how best to work a negative. A print dated to the 1950s is therefore a print from the first years of that arrangement.

One picture, several titles

The Museum of Modern Art prints the title as Behind the Gare St. Lazare, abbreviating the saint. The photograph also circulates as Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, as Derrière la gare Saint-Lazare, and as Place de l'Europe, Gare Saint-Lazare. The last of those is not a second photograph. The place de l'Europe is the square built over the throat of the station's tracks, and the yard in the picture lies behind the station beside it.

The Museum of Modern Art's collection holds no work by Henri Cartier-Bresson titled Place de l'Europe. The J. Paul Getty Museum, which holds 110 of his objects, holds none of that title either; its single Paris 1932 print, 84.XM.233.1, is described in its own record as two dogs on a pavement.

Publication and afterlife

The photograph reached a New York audience early. The Museum of Modern Art identifies the print in installation photographs of The Photographs of Henri Cartier Bresson, which ran from 4 February to 6 April 1947, the exhibition whose catalogue Lincoln Kirstein wrote. The Foundation's bibliography lists that catalogue as the first book of his work.

In 1952 the Paris publisher Tériade brought out Images à la sauvette at Éditions Verve, with text and photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson and a cover drawn by Henri Matisse. Simon and Schuster retitled the American edition The Decisive Moment, and the English title became the name of the working method. The French title means something closer to pictures snatched on the run, the way an unlicensed hawker sells goods on a street corner.

The Museum of Modern Art has gone on identifying the print in its own installation views since. It appears in The Photographer's Eye in the summer of 1964 and in Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Work in the autumn of 1987. It appears again in Photography Collection: Rotation 4 from December 2006 to July 2007, and in Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century from April to June 2010.

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

The frame divides on the waterline. Above it are the station roofs, a railing and a hoarding; below it the same things again, upside down, with a leaping man crossing the join. The close views take the two halves apart and read the lettering, which is legible.

Detail views use the same reproduction throughout. Collection record at the Museum of Modern Art.