Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ‘Man and Machine’: Rethinking the Cold War Traffic in Photographs, against the Grain

Abstract

Abstract In 1967 IBM (International Business Machines) commissioned Henri Cartier-Bresson to produce a portfolio of photographs depicting human relationships with technology around the world. These images, along with a selection from the photographer’s archive were realized in 1968 as the touring exhibition and photobook Man and Machine. In contrast to the images of war, revolution and protest, so often mobilized as the documentary imaginary and record of these years, Man and Machine appears to celebrate a harmonious technologically mediated world over which man was still in control. More than this, it seemingly flattens the stark divides between First and Third World experiences under the leveling glow of liberal humanism and what was being naturalized as its equivalent: global Capital. Approaching Man and Machine retrospectively – from the perspective of the New Left’s 1970s critique of documentary humanist photography – as well as in terms of its own contemporaneousness, resituating it in the contemporary image cultures of the Cold War – I propose that documentary photography’s ideological mobility at this juncture might be understood not only as an inherent weakness or limit – as the means of its compromise and ultimate failure – but also as a resource: a potential arsenal of unpredictable, disjunctive and even radical political affects and effects.