ABSTRACT
Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson: the mind reels slightly at the thought of these two great names and the achievements they signify. The current Cartier-Bresson exhibition at the Hallmark Gallery is a more narrowly focused survey. It consists entirely of the photographs in Cartier-Bresson's France, a new book that brings the photographer's first concentrated view of his native country. Cartier-Bresson's pictures come from inside society, Evans's from outside, far outside. Evans isolates his theme, and the very rigor of his design is a coefficient of the distance he places between his own photographic image of the motif and its conventional associations. Cartier-Bresson offers a glimpse of the human comedy—and never more so than in the new pictures of France. Evans's characteristic motif is a building or a group of buildings or an interior or something in a landscape—an object, or objects, in space.
