PHOTO EXHIBIT REVIEW : Impact of Lartigue’s Photographs Is Strong Only if the Viewer Goes Strictly by the Book

In the world of photography, what happens in the darkroom--as Ansel Adams showed us--can be as crucial as the decisive moment when the film is exposed. The darkroom artist has sway over almost everything, from the finest detail to the tone and mood of the ultimate photograph.

A visitor to the “Jacques-Henri Lartigue: Panoramas of the Twenties” exhibit at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park will get a completely different sense of Lartigue depending on whether the visitor views the prints in the exhibit or in the accompanying catalogue. The show is one of two on display at the museum through June 26.

The prints of Lartigue’s family and friends on holiday at the beach or at a Grand Prix race or traveling abroad have a soft, creamy quality that calls out to be touched. However, these images, printed after Lartigue’s death in 1986, repress detail. The result is that the rich are somewhat dwarfed by their surroundings. Also, despite the prints’ warmth, many of them tend to look like little more than snapshots of the French upper class at play, taken by one of its privileged members.

Those prints that deal more subtly with composition or concentrate on light, shadow and detail seem to work better in the catalogue, which used a different process of reproduction.

The warmth of the prints are sacrificed for detail in the catalogue, where the images have a higher contrast. They also reveal a subtle humor that is missing in the darker exhibit prints.

Few of the about 40 prints--those with a strong sense of composition--succeed in grabbing and holding the viewer’s attention.

They were photographed with a special twin lens stereoscopic camera--hence the term Panoramas in the title--which resulted in prints in an elongated format.

An example of such a successful exposure is one showing Lartigue’s first wife, Bibi, seated under a parasol on the beach near the waterline. Made in 1927 and titled “Shadow and Reflection,” the print has an unerring sense of dramatic composition. Framed between the parasol and its reflection, Bibi, graceful and shapely in a striped swimming suit, seems like a pearl in a shell.

Similarly, in a 1923 photograph Bibi stands on an elevated, narrow country lane between two fields. A tall, bushy tree behind her echoes her presence and helps establish a delicious tension in the picture.

In other shots of Bibi, walking on a London sidewalk or riding atop a double-decker bus, she is little more than a dim, undistinguished figure in the prints. In the catalogue, her beauty jumps out in sharp contrast to the drab, impersonal background of the city.

Indeed, in the catalogue all of the photographs jump out. A print of a street singer serenading a passing motorist appears better composed and has a poignant edge that is missing in the exhibition print.

Similarly, Lartigue’s “First and Last Flight of the Chauve-Souris,” a bat-winged, pedal-powered flying machine (1922), appears in the catalogue as a comic image of a group of young men trying to pull the ill-fated and apparently reluctant Chauve-Souris across a field on a rope. The darker print of this scene on the museum wall has been drained of all energy and humor.

The exhibit, which is touring the United States, was organized by Isabella Jammes of the Lartigue archives of the government of France. When juxtaposed with the catalogue, it poses interesting questions about what the artist actually intended.

The other exhibit at MOPA, “Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Work 1929-1934,” reveals this modern master’s early fascination with Cubism, surrealism and photojournalism, for which he later became famous.

It was Cartier-Bresson who coined the phrase “the decisive moment,” referring to those fleeting instances when people and things compose themselves to tell a visual story.

This exhibit is filled with examples of such magical moments.

In one of two 1933 photographs of young boys in Seville, Spain, Cartier-Bresson uses a huge hole in a wall to frame the pair as they joyously prep with each other. In the second image--apparently taken seconds later--the same scene becomes charged with a surreal intensity as the boys react to the presence of the photographer.

Whereas Lartigue’s photographs have an autobiographical resonance for a particular time and place--1920s France--and a wealthy culture at leisure, Cartier-Bresson generally is less concerned with place and instead deals with either emotion or vigorous composition that reflect Cubism’s influence on him.

However, unlike Lartigue, who photographed his own kind, Cartier-Bresson sought out the poor, the commonplace and the illicit, photographing prostitutes in Mexico City with an outrageousness that is almost Fellini-esque. His photographs of the poor in Mexico, who are often shown huddled on sidewalks, have a startling frankness.

Many of the photographs in this exhibit were taken during a world tour by Cartier-Bresson from 1930 to 1934, including stops in Mexico, Italy, Spain, Africa and Eastern Europe. The photographer, then in his 20s, was busy rebelling against the well-heeled world in which he grew up, preferring the ideas of the avant-garde.

Cartier-Bresson shows a knack for both locating angular patterns amid the everyday urban landscape and the patience to wait for the combination of people and pattern needed to make an indelible image. A winding road beneath jutting stair railings makes a remarkable frame for the bicyclist who finally wheeled into view.

Two anchors and a length of hawser half buried in the sand in Spanish Morocco naturally divide and balance a section of the beach once some boys begin playing around them.

In this early work, Cartier-Bresson shows a remarkable skill for understanding exactly how forms and human beings interact to produce startling visual art.