Making of ‘Behind the Gare St Lazare’ (by Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1932), 2016

The story behind the photograph…

The work of the legendary French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) is often characterized by his phrase ‘the decisive moment’. Pioneering the genre of street photography, with its requirement for spontaneity and intuition, he immortalized the ephemeral. His iconic image of a man jumping across a pool of water behind a train station was taken in Paris in 1932 with a 35mm Leica. The photographer recalled: ‘There was a plank fence around some repairs behind the Gare St Lazare, and I was peeking through the space with my camera at my eye. This is what I saw. The space between the planks was not entirely wide enough for my lens, which is the reason the picture is cut off on the left.’ This was reportedly one of only two photographs that Cartier-Bresson ever cropped. The New York Times noted: ‘Cartier-Bresson brings to his image layer on layer of fresh and uncanny detail: the figure of a leaping dancer on a pair of posters on a wall behind the man mirrors him and his reflection in the water; the rippling circles made by the ladder echo circular bands of discarded metal debris; another poster, advertising a performer named Railowsky, puns with the railway station and the ladder, which, flat, resembles a railroad track.’ Time magazine dubbed the image the ‘Photo of the Century’.