It seems like an easy snapshot: a candid street photo showing a sidewalk in front of some non-descript building, a couple of benches, a group of older women in light-colored dresses. The title identifies only the place & year: Brooklyn, Grand Street, 1947. Henri Cartier-Bresson was an expert of this seemingly casual, yet very attentive composition, a master of the “image on the run” that reveals our common humanity.

We are looking at the gathering from the point of view of a passerby, not within the circle of friends, but also not excluded. We watch over the shoulder of someone standing a little bit to the side. The attention within the group is not very focused: two women are sitting with their backs to us, one is glancing down, another turns sideways, three look towards us, or rather towards the woman over whose shoulder we are observing the scene, two are laughing together so whole-heartily that we almost hear the laughter. In the foreground the dogs are playing, as if buoyed by everyone’s good time. It must be a summer afternoon or evening, a break in a daily routine of work and care. The feeling is friendly, a suspension of caution and judgment. We are almost invited to make one more step and join in conversation to share this fleeting moment of companionship, somewhere in the big city.

Cartier-Bresson, one of the greatest photographers of the 20^th c., lived mostly in France, but wandered with his small Leica camera across the world, traveling to Mexico and the US, India and China, across Europe, everywhere. Whether working as a freelancer or on assignments for glossy publications such as the American magazine Life and the French Regards, he searched to capture the “decisive moment,” a detail that is very telling and significant. His photos, like William Blake’s poems, prompt us to see “a world in a grain of sand” and appreciate the extraordinary pulse of life that can be glimpsed even in the most ordinary scene.

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