Photography: Drunk on A World Served Straight

MOMA brings out the surrealist in Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson once said he approached his camera as a "combination of the psychiatrist's couch, a machine gun and a warm kiss." That language has a familiar ring to it. The shock compactions of imagery, the off-kilter linkage of sex, death and Freud -- it all smacks of surrealism. But who would expect to hear it from a great photojournalist? Cartier-Bresson's fame is based on four decades of incomparable camera reporting. Mention his name and what comes to mind is his great surveys of life in China, the Soviet Union and his native France, not the enigmatic jokes of Max Ernst...

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