Henri Cartier-Bresson
Going round the Dorothy Bohm exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery yesterday, the thing I found most interesting was my sense of disappointment at the quality of her work. This sense of disappointment became the most interesting feature of this respectable exhibition. Her early black and white work and certain individual images were pleasing, but I found myself asking why much of the (especially) later work seemed limited. This 1984 photograph of Hong Kong is a case in point. Throughout much of her work she seems to use the motif of combining mostly advertising posters with people or objects in the street. This is something I have done many times but too often, it produces little more than an unusual blend of subjects; in the image below, a plane, a Hong Kong tram and its passengers. To use Cartier-Bresson's words (above), the Bohm picture engages the eye with an unusual blend of subjects and possibly the head in that there is interest in the juxtaposition of different forms of transport. The passengers also add a rhythm to the image and there is a pleasing pair of passengers with their back to the photographer in the top left of the picture. However, I cannot feel the picture "engaging the heart on the same axis". Rather, this image, like so many of the later pictures in the exhibition is merely competent in contrast to the Robert Capa exhibition in Budapest last summer which filled me with wonder at the sheer work of recording so many striking moments in time.
