Wright Morris, L'Essence du Visible @ Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Wright Morris, Dresser Drawer, Ed's Place, Norfolk Nebraska, 1947

The Fondation Henri-Cartier Bresson has recently moved its galleries to a wonderful new space on rue des Archives. I missed the inaugural Martine Frank exhibition earlier in the year, so the Wright Morris was my first venture to the new space.

Wright Morris was born and presumably grew up in Norfolk, Nebraska in the prewar decades at the beginning of the twentieth century. And that is the world that not only informed his photography, but became its subject matter over the course of a lifetime. Morris oscillated between writing and photography it seems for much of his life, but the works in this exhibition indicate his skill with the camera. While some of the photographs reveal his concentrated focus on the effects of light, to me these images are about framing, and about composition.

Wright Morris, The Home Place, Norfolk Nebraska, 1947

For me, the photographs are interesting because they are about a midwest America that no longer exists. It is a hot, lonely and desolate world that was left behind following the depression and the postwar move to the cities. This sense of a lost world permeates the photographs. Windows are transparent and made opaque by the no longer used objects piles up behind them. They are simultaneously reflective of the activities on the street in front. It is important to note that Wright Morris's mid-West is a world that is well-lived in, rather than being desperately poor like that shown in Walker Evans famous photos. And unlike Walker Evans there are no people. Rather, Wright is interested in capturing the presence of people through their absence from a chair, a tin can left on the verandah, a comb missing teeth on an old vanity chest.

Wright Morris, "Gano" Grain Elevator, Kinsley, Kansas, 1940

I was struck - as I often am by the interior living spaces pictured in Walker Evans's photographs - by the immaculate tidiness of the interiors in Wright Morris's photographs. The people may not have fur coats and diamonds - more like frayed jackets and a pair of scissors on the table - but everything is in its place. The well-lived in spaces also have everything they need. It might be poor, but poverty is not the focus of the image. The markedly geometrical framing saves the images from evoking both pity and nostalgia. We see cupboards with doors that don't fit, we see old carpets and chairs, but there's no yearning for that past, there's no feeling sorry for their owners. Rather, we see in the images the rush to document worlds before they are lost.

Wright Morris, Farmhouse in Winter, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1941

As I wandered this exhibition, I was often overcome by thoughts of these places in Nebraska and Ohio today. This is middle America. These are the plains that saw the productivity of the land prior to the Depression, and I imagine that since then, things have gone downhill. This is the country of belief in a set of values and a way of life that no longer exists, a world that continues to be exploited by capitalism and the greed of those with power and money. It might look very different today, but it remains a world left behind.



All Photographs copyright Wright Morris Estate