Behind the Gare St. Lazare
Framed: 23 1/2 x 19 1/2 inches (59.69 x 49.53 cm)
New Acquisitions to the Hallmark Photographic Collection, 1980-1983. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, April 1 – May 1, 1983.
Beyond Sight: The Photographs of Harold E. Edgerton. Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS. March – August 1986.
Photographic Abstraction. Utah State University, Logan, UT, Sierra Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV, Fine Art Center/Cheekwood, Nashville, TN, Montgomery Museum of Art, AL, January – September 1987, no cat.
Tempus Fugit: Times Flies. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO. October 15 – December 31, 2000.
“There was a plank fence around some repairs behind the Gare Lazare [train station], and I was peeking through the spaces with my camera eye,” Henri Cartier-Bresson later recalled about the moment he took this photograph. “This is what I saw. The space between the planks was not entirely wide enough for my lens, which is the reason the picture is cut off on the left.”
The highly intuitive, sometimes imperfect, split-second picture-making Cartier-Bresson describes here is key to what he called “the decisive moment.”
