Yes, I like Cartier-Bresson's work. However he's already famous, so I wonder if we need to build him up to super-human level in a poetic elegy?
Exhibit 1: "and the play on words arising from the “Railowsky” poster appearing in a railway station"
Well yes, except that HCG was French, and the word "rail" doesn't really occur in any of the French words associated with ralways: it was behind "la gare", which serves "le chemin de fer" ("paths of iron"). I'd say fortuitous, rather than pre-visualised.
Exhibit 2: "the running boy in this image was probably previsualized by Cartier-Bresson"
Well maybe. I'd probably believe he imagined a person walking into that space... it'd be interesting to see the contact sheet, I doubt he waited for a running boy before exposing any film.
Exhibit 3: "Cartier Bresson uses the subject, a little girl standing on a man’s outstretched hand, to turn a dynamic waiting stage — the natural canvas of water, mountain and clouds behind the girl — into a static painting."
That's certainly a challenging juxtaposition: "dynamic waiting". Especially when it's a lake and some hills that are doing the waiting, objects not usually noted for their dynamic potential. In fact the sentence makes no sense to me at all, and reads like the sort of post-modernist Lacanian stream of consciousness crap that art has been afflicted with for the last 40 years or so.
Exhibit 4, back behind the station: "The location of the right heel of the man jumping from the ladder in Behind the Gare – so perfectly timed – reveals an unseen world, flashing before our eyes, normally veiled by the flow of time."
Really? No one ever imagined that there is a moment before a splash? Didn't J-H Lartigue do similar things many, many times?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/staticarchive/591b5a0d1cbfe0f9bdce77759633228736f7ce6d.jpg