Cartier-Bresson and the Philosophy of American Decay

There was plenty of glitz in America in the sixties and seventies, yes and in the forties, the era of these pictures, but clearly Cartier-Bresson was trying to get behind it to the substance of American society. And since his is fundamentally a tragic vision he reacted most feelingly to what in America he saw as related to its decay, its pain. The very horizon is often oppressive, jagged with junked cars, the detritus of consumer culture, which after all is a culture of planned waste, engineered obsolescence. Whatever lasts is boring, what demands its own replacement energizes our imaginations.