Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson (August 22, 1908 – August 3, 2004) was a French photographer. Cartier-Bresson is considered to be the father of modern photojournalism. He was one of the first serious photographers to shoot in the smaller 35mm format, and is commonly considered the master of candid photography using the 35mm rangefinder camera. He helped to develop the "street photography" style that influenced generations of photographers that followed.

Biography

As a young boy, Cartier-Bresson owned a Box Brownie, using it for taking holiday snapshots; he later experimented with a 3×4 inch view camera. He was raised in a traditional French bourgeois fashion, required to address his parents as vous rather than the familiar tu. His father assumed that his son would take up the family business, but Henri was headstrong and was "strongly appalled"[citation needed] by the prospect.
The early years
Cartier-Bresson was educated in Paris. He attended the École Fénelon, a Catholic school. He was introduced to the feel of oil painting by his Uncle Louis, a gifted painter. "Painting has been my obsession from the time that my 'mythical father', my father's brother, led me into his studio during the Christmas holidays in 1913, when I was five years old. There I lived in the atmosphere of painting; I inhaled the canvases."[citation needed] Uncle Louis taught him painting for a short while before he was killed during World War I.

In 1927, at the age of 19, he entered a private art school and the Paris studio of the Cubist and sculptor André Lhote, the Lhote Academy (in the Rue d'Odessa in the Montparnasse district). Lhote's ambition was to unify the Cubists' approach to reality with classical artistic forms, and to link the French classical tradition of Poussin and David to Modernism. Cartier-Bresson also studied painting with society portraitist Jacques Émile Blanche. While painting, he read Dostoevsky, Schopenhauer, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Freud, Proust, Joyce, Hegel, Engels and Marx. Lhote took his pupils to the Louvre to study classical artists and to Parisian galleries to study contemporary art. Cartier Bresson's interest in modern art was combined with an admiration for the works of the Renaissance—of masterpieces from Jan van Eyck, Paolo Uccello, Masaccio and Piero della Francesca. Cartier-Bresson often regarded Lhote as his teacher of photography without a camera.

Although Cartier-Bresson gradually began to feel uncomfortable with Lhote's "rule-laden" approach to art, his rigorous theoretical training would later help him to confront and resolve problems of artistic form and composition in photography. At the time, schools of photographic realism were founded throughout Europe. Each had a differing concept on how photography should develop. The photography revolution had begun, "Crush tradition! Photograph things as they are!"

The Surrealist movement founded in 1924 was a big driver of this change in approach. While still studying at Lhote's studio, Cartier-Bresson began socializing with the Surrealists at the Café Cyrano, in the Place Blanche. He met a number of the movement's leading protagonists, and was particularly drawn to the Surrealist movement of linking the subconscious and the immediate to their work. Peter Galassi explains:

The Surrealists approached photography in the same way that Aragon and Breton...approached the street: with a voracious appetite for the usual and unusual...The Surrealists recognized in plain photographic fact an essential quality that had been excluded from prior theories of photographic realism. They saw that ordinary photographs, especially when uprooted from their practical functions, contain a wealth of unintended, unpredictable meanings.[1]
Cartier-Bresson matured artistically in this stormy cultural and political environment. He was aware of the concepts and theories mentioned but could not find a way of expressing this imaginatively in his paintings. He was very frustrated with his experiments and subsequently destroyed the majority of his early works.

From 1928 to 1929, Cartier-Bresson attended the University of Cambridge studying English art and literature and became bilingual. In 1930, he did his mandatory service in the French Army. He was stationed at Le Bourget, near Paris. He remembered, "And I had quite a hard time of it, too, because I was toting Joyce under my arm and a Lebel rifle on my shoulder."

In 1931, once out of the Army and after having read Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Cartier-Bresson sought adventure on the Côte d'Ivoire, within French colonial Africa. He wrote, "I left Lhote's studio because I did not want to enter into that systematic spirit. I wanted to be myself. To paint and to change the world counted for more than everything in my life."[citation needed] He survived by shooting game and selling it to local villagers. From hunting, he learned methods that he would later use in his photography techniques. It was there on the Côte d'Ivoire that he contracted blackwater fever, which nearly killed him. He was so ill that he sent instructions for his own funeral. While still feverish, he wrote a postcard to his grandfather, asking that he be buried in Normandy, at the edge of the Eawy forest, with Debussy's String Quartet to be played at the funeral. An uncle wrote back, "Your grandfather finds all that too expensive. It would be preferable that you return first."

Cartier-Bresson brought along a portable camera (smaller than a Brownie Box) to Côte d'Ivoire, but most of his films did not survive the tropics. Only seven photographs survived. When he returned to France, he deepened his relationship with the Surrealists.

Cartier-Bresson recuperated in Marseille in 1931. He became inspired by a photograph shot in 1931 by Hungarian photojournalist Martin Munkacsi showing three naked young African boys, caught in near-silhouette, running into the surf of Lake Tanganyika. Titled Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika, this captured the freedom, grace and spontaneity of their movement and their joy at being alive. Cartier-Bresson said:

In 1934 Cartier-Bresson met a young Polish intellectual, a photographer named David Szymin. Szymin was called "Chim" because his name was difficult to pronounce. Later Szymin changed his name to David Seymour. The two had much in common culturally. Before long, "Chim" introduced his friend to a Hungarian photographer named Endré Friedmann, who later changed his name to Robert Capa. The three shared a studio in the early 1930s. Capa mentored and advised Cartier-Bresson, "Don't keep the label of a surrealist photographer. Be a photojournalist. If not you will fall into mannerism. Keep surrealism in your little heart, my dear. Don't fidget. Get moving!"

Cartier-Bresson was first published as a photojournalist in 1937 when assigned to cover the coronation of King George VI, for the French weekly Regards. He focused on the new monarch's adoring subjects lining the London streets, and took no pictures of the king. The accompanying credit for his photographs published in Regards, read "Cartier": he was hesitant about using his full family name.

Towards the end of the War, rumors had reached America that Cartier-Bresson had been killed. His film on returning war refugees (released in the United States in 1947) spurred a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The MoMA had begun to prepare a "posthumous" show for him. In 1946, when they learned that he was still alive, he volunteered to go to New York to help with the preparation of this exhibition. The show made its debut in 1947. Together with this show, the MoMA also published the first book of his work, The Photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with texts by Lincoln Kirstein and Beaumont Newhall.

Some of Magnum's first projects were People Live Everywhere, Youth of the World, Women of the World and The Child Generation. Magnum aimed to use photography in the service of humanity, and provided some of the most arresting, widely viewed and popular images of this period.

• The Decisive Moment

Cartier-Bresson achieved international recognition for his coverage of Gandhi's funeral in India in 1948 and the last (1949) stage of the Chinese Civil War. He covered the last six months of the Kuomintang administration and the first six months of the Maoist People's Republic. He also photographed the last surviving Imperial eunuchs in Beijing, as the city was falling to the communists. From China, he went on to Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), where he documented the gaining of independence from the Dutch.

In 1952, Cartier-Bresson published his book Images à la sauvette, whose English edition was titled The Decisive Moment. It included a portfolio of 126 of his photos from the East and the West. The book's cover was drawn by Henri Matisse. For his 4,500-word philosophical preface, Cartier-Bresson took his keynote text from the 17th-century Cardinal de Retz: "Il n'y a rien dans ce monde qui n'ait un moment decisif" ("There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment"). Cartier-Bresson applied this to his photographic style. He said: "To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms that give that event its proper expression."[citation needed]

Both titles came from publishers. Tériade, the Greek-born French publisher whom Cartier-Bresson idolized, gave the book its French title, Images à la Sauvette, which can loosely be translated as "images on the run" or "stolen images." Dick Simon of Simon & Schuster came up with the English title The Decisive Moment. Margot Shore, Magnum's Paris bureau chief, did the English translation of Cartier-Bresson's French preface.

"Photography is not like painting," Cartier-Bresson told the Washington Post in 1957. "There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative," he said. "Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever."[citation needed]

Cartier-Bresson held his first exhibition in France at the Pavillon de Marsan in the Louvre in 1955.

Cartier-Bresson retired from photography in the early 1970s and by 1975 no longer took pictures other than an occasional private portrait; he said he kept his camera in a safe at his house and rarely took it out. He returned to drawing and painting. After a lifetime of developing his artistic vision through photography, he said, "All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing."[citation needed] He held his first exhibition of drawings at the Carlton Gallery in New York in 1975.

The Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation was created by Cartier-Bresson, his wife and daughter in 2002, to preserve and share his legacy.

Cartier-Bresson spent over three decades on assignment for Life and many other prominent journals. He traveled without bounds, documenting some of the great upheavals of the 20th century — the Spanish civil war, the liberation of Paris in 1945, the 1968 student rebellion in Paris, the fall of the Kuomintang in China to the communists, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the Berlin Wall, and the deserts of Egypt. And along the way he paused to document portraits of Sartre, Picasso, Colette, Matisse, Pound and Giacometti.

Cartier-Bresson was a photographer who hated to be photographed and treasured his privacy above all. Photographs of Cartier-Bresson do exist, but they are scant.When he accepted an honorary degree from Oxford University in 1975, he held a paper in front of his face to avoid being photographed.

Cartier-Bresson believed that what went on beneath the surface was nobody's business but his own. He did recall[citation needed] that he once confided his innermost secrets to a Paris taxi driver, certain that he would never meet the man again.

Cartier-Bresson worked exclusively in black and white, other than a few unsuccessful attempts in color. He never developed or made his own prints.[citation needed] He said: "I've never been interested in the process of photography, never, never. Right from the beginning. For me, photography with a small camera like the Leica is an instant drawing."

Cartier-Bresson is regarded as one of the art world's most unassuming personalities. He disliked publicity and exhibited a ferocious shyness since his days in hiding from the Nazis during World War II. Although he took many famous portraits, his own face was little known to the world at large (which presumably had the advantage of allowing him to work on the street in peace). He dismissed others' applications of the term "art" to his photographs, which he thought were merely his gut reactions to moments in time that he had happened upon. He often wrapped black tape around the camera's chrome body to make it less conspicuous.