Art in Focus: Henri Cartier-Bresson's Refugees Performing Exercises, Kurukshetra, India

What do you get when you put one of the world’s greatest photographers and one of the most pivotal moments in 20th-century world history together? Iconic photographs, is what.

Henri Cartier-Bresson travelled to India in 1947, the year of its independence from British rule. The trip cemented his reputation as a pioneer of photojournalism. Documenting the tumultuous birth of a nation can have that effect. 

His photographs of India from that trip show a nation suffused with the triumph of freedom, the turmoil of Partition and the trauma of Gandhi’s assassination. Cartier-Bresson was a master of what he called “the decisive moment”, that fleeting point in space-time where an unrehearsed scene comes together in a perfect composition—like a work of art. In the analogue age, this required true mastery of the craft.

That mastery is on full view in this photograph of refugees exercising against a blank wall at a camp in Kurukshetra with cheerful abandon to ward off entirely expected feelings of lethargy and ennui. Wildly flailing arms, shoes off the feet … it’s a peculiarly buoyant photograph given the sombre backdrop of Partition. Only the intuition of a genius like Cartier-Bresson could have captured a moment like this for all eternity.