{"id":15527,"date":"2011-08-23T14:18:00","date_gmt":"2011-08-23T13:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amateurphotographer.co.uk\/uncategorized\/dessau-1945-informer-henri-cartier-bresson-iconic-photograph-15527"},"modified":"2014-10-23T11:32:27","modified_gmt":"2014-10-23T10:32:27","slug":"dessau-1945-informer-henri-cartier-bresson-iconic-photograph","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/other.kelsey.host\/amateurphotographer\/iconic-images\/dessau-1945-informer-henri-cartier-bresson-iconic-photograph\/","title":{"rendered":"DESSAU 1945 (Informer) – Henri Cartier-Bresson – Iconic Photograph"},"content":{"rendered":"

Image: Dessau. A young Belgian woman and former Gestapo informer, being identified as she tried to hide in the crowd \u00a9 Henri Cartier-Bresson\/Magnum Photo<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The \u2018decisive moment\u2019 is a phrase so frequently quoted when describing the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson that it has become almost a clich\u00e9. It was the title of the English edition of his landmark 1952 book, but its original French title, Images \u00e0 la Sauvette, is roughly translated as images taken \u2018on the run\u2019. Nevertheless, it\u2019s a phrase that gets directly to the heart of Cartier-Bresson\u2019s photography and cannot be avoided when discussing this extraordinary picture, shot in Germany in April 1945.<\/p>\n

Cartier-Bresson was 36 years old at the time the photo was taken and had been taking photographs since 1931. He had also worked in filmmaking and had assisted the celebrated French director Jean Renoir on two of his films.<\/p>\n

At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Cartier-Bresson joined the French Army\u2019s film and photo unit. His work involved filming and photographing artillery fire, road bombardments and troop movements. However, in June 1940, he was taken prisoner by the German army and was held for more than three years, most of which were spent doing hard manual labour.<\/p>\n

He tried to escape three times and succeeded at the third attempt, returning to France with forged papers. Before being captured, Cartier-Bresson had buried his beloved Leica in farmland in France. One of the first things he did after escaping was to return to the farm and dig it up. He later photographed the liberation of Paris in the summer of 1944 while working as a war correspondent.<\/p>\n

The following year, the American Office of War Information asked Cartier-Bresson to make a documentary film about French prisoners of war and refugees; it was, as Cartier-Bresson called it, \u2018a film by prisoners about prisoners\u2019. <\/p>\n

Part of the resulting film, Le Retour (The Return), was made in an American-controlled transit camp for refugees, former prisoners of war and other \u2018displaced persons\u2019 in Dessau, Germany. One sequence, shot in April 1945, shows the interrogation of a Gestapo informer in front of a crowd. While the cameraman filmed the unfolding events, Cartier-Bresson photographed still images of the scene with his Leica from a slightly lower viewpoint.<\/p>\n

The three people in Cartier-Bresson\u2019s photograph are a woman being publicly exposed as a Nazi collaborator; the woman accusing her, dressed in black; and a gaunt, serious-looking man who is seated at a desk and clearly an authority figure. The identities of the two women are not known, but Cartier-Bresson noted that the accused woman was Belgian and \u2018a Gestapo informer [who was] recognised before she could hide in the crowd.\u2019 <\/p>\n

The man has been identified as Wilhelm Heinrich van der Velden, a young Dutchman who had been appointed camp commandant at Dessau by the American military. Van der Velden had himself been recently liberated from the Westerbork concentration camp, which was set up by the Nazis in the Netherlands.<\/p>\n

At the moment the picture was taken, the informer stands with her head bowed in shame while the woman accusing her bares her teeth and raises her arm, filled with rage and the desire for revenge. Their contrasting expressions symbolise the feelings of people on the winning and losing sides in a long and devastating war: the triumphant anger of people finally liberated from the tyranny of Nazi control and the humiliation of the German defeat. <\/p>\n

The footage in Le Retour offers a fascinating glimpse at background events to this image. The film\u2019s Dessau sequence begins with an overview of the courtyard scene and shows that hundreds of former prisoners and refugees were watching the informer\u2019s denunciation. The film cuts to her being escorted to a desk, where the accuser berates her and at one point hits her in the face, knocking her out of the frame. As Cartier-Bresson noted, however, the action captured in his photograph has been edited out of the film.<\/p>\n

After shooting the famous image, Cartier-Bresson went on to record what happened afterwards. Subsequent pictures in the sequence show the accuser following the increasingly beleaguered and shamefaced informer and striking her with a stick as the crowd looks on. These images give some indication of the informer\u2019s fate, but it\u2019s the first image that captures, in one fleeting moment, everything that needs to be said about the situation.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a feat that Cartier-Bresson achieved countless times in his career, and his approach to photography has since inspired generations of photojournalists. He later summed up this distinctive and revolutionary approach to photography in the introduction to Images \u00e0 la Sauvette. <\/p>\n

In this text, Cartier-Bresson wrote that his aim was to \u2018preserve life in the act of living\u2019, and added: \u2018Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.\u2019 That\u2019s exactly what he achieves in this image. <\/p>\n

Events of 1945<\/h2>\n