Henri Cartier-Bresson
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Henri
Cartier-Bresson (August 22, 1908 – August 3, 2004) was a French
photographer considered to be the father of modern photojournalism, an
early adopter of 35 mm format, and the master of candid photography. He
helped develop the "street photography" style that has influenced
generations of photographers that followed.
Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup-en-Brie, near Paris, France, the
eldest of five children. His father was a wealthy textile manufacturer
whose Cartier-Bresson thread was a staple of French sewing kits. He also
sketched in his spare time. His mother's family were cotton merchants and
landowners from Normandy, where he spent part of his childhood. The
Cartier-Bresson family lived in a bourgeois neighborhood in Paris, near
the Europe Bridge, and provided him with financial support to develop his
interests in photography in a more independent manner than many of his
contemporaries.
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 appalled by this prospect.
Cartier-Bresson studied in Paris at the École Fénelon, a Catholic school.
His uncle Louis, a gifted painter, introduced Cartier-Bresson to oil
painting. "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' painting lessons were cut short, however, when he died in World War
I.
In 1927, at the age of 19, Cartier-Bresson entered a private art school
and the Lhote Academy, the Parisian studio of the Cubist painter and
sculptor André Lhote. Lhote's ambition was to unify the Cubists' approach
to reality with classical artistic forms, and to link the French classical
tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David to Modernism.
Cartier-Bresson also studied painting with society portraitist Jacques
Émile Blanche. During this period 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. In the 1920s, schools of photographic realism
were popping up throughout Europe, but each had a different view on the
direction photography should take. The photography revolution had begun:
"Crush tradition! Photograph things as they are!" The Surrealist
movement (founded in 1924) was a catalyst for this paradigm shift. 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. 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 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."
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. While still feverish he sent
instructions for his own funeral, writing his grandfather and asking to be
buried in Normandie, at the edge of the Eawy forest while Debussy's String
Quartet played. An uncle wrote back, "Your grandfather finds all that too
expensive. It would be preferable that you return first." Although
Cartier-Bresson took a portable camera (smaller than a Brownie Box) to
Côte d'Ivoire, only seven photographs survived the tropics.
Returning to France, Cartier-Bresson recuperated in Marseille in 1931 and
deepened his relationship with the Surrealists. He became inspired by a
1930 photograph 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:
"The only thing which completely was an amazement to me and brought me to
photography was the work of Munkacsi. When I saw the photograph of
Munkacsi of the black kids running in a wave I couldn't believe such a
thing could be caught with the camera. I said damn it, I took my camera
and went out into the street."The photograph inspired him to stop painting
and to take up photography seriously. He explained, "I suddenly understood
that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant." He
acquired the Leica camera with 50 mm lens in Marseilles that would
accompany him for many years. He described the Leica as an extension of
his eye. The anonymity that the small camera gave him in a crowd or
during an intimate moment was essential in overcoming the formal and
unnatural behavior of those who were aware of being photographed. The
Leica opened up new possibilities in photography — the ability to capture
the world in its actual state of movement and transformation. He said, "I
prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce,
ready to 'trap' life." Restless, he photographed in Berlin,
Brussels, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and Madrid. His photographs were first
exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1932, and subsequently
at the Ateneo Club in Madrid. In 1934 in Mexico, he shared an exhibition
with Manuel Alvarez Bravo. In the beginning, he did not photograph much in
his native France. It would be years before he photographed there
extensively.
In 1934 Cartier-Bresson met a young Polish intellectual, a photographer
named David Szymin who was called "Chim" because his name was difficult to
pronounce. Szymin later changed his name to David Seymour. The two had
much in common culturally. Through Chim, Cartier-Bresson met a Hungarian
photographer named Endré Friedmann, who later changed his name to Robert
Capa. The three shared a studio in the early 1930s and Capa mentored
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
traveled to the United States in 1935 with an invitation to exhibit his
work at New York's Julien Levy Gallery. He shared display space with
fellow photographers Walker Evans and Manuel Alvarez Bravo. Carmel Snow of
Harper's Bazaar, gave him a fashion assignment, but he fared poorly since
he had no idea how to direct or interact with the models. Nevertheless,
Snow was the first American editor to publish Cartier-Bresson's
photographs in a magazine. While in New York, he met photographer Paul
Strand, who did camerawork for the Depression-era documentary The Plow
That Broke the Plains. When he returned to France, Cartier-Bresson applied
for a job with renowned French film director Jean Renoir. He acted in
Renoir's 1936 film Partie de campagne and in the 1939 La Règle du jeu, for
which he played a butler and served as second assistant. Renoir made
Cartier-Bresson act so he could understand how it felt to be on the other
side of the camera. Cartier-Bresson also helped Renoir make a film for the
Communist party on the 200 families, including his own, who ran France.
During the Spanish civil war, Cartier-Bresson co-directed an anti-fascist
film with Herbert Kline, to promote the Republican medical services.
Cartier-Bresson's first photojournalist photos to be published came in
1937 when he covered 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. His photo credit
read "Cartier," as he was hesitant to use his full family name.
In 1937, Cartier-Bresson married a Javanese dancer, Ratna Mohini. They
lived in a fourth-floor servants' flat at 19, rue Danielle Casanova, a
large studio with a small bedroom, kitchen and bathroom where
Cartier-Bresson developed film. Between 1937 and 1939 Cartier-Bresson
worked as a photographer for the French Communists' evening paper, Ce Soir.
With Chim and Capa, Cartier-Bresson was a leftist, but he did not join the
French Communist party. He joined the French Army as a Corporal in the
Film and Photo unit when World War II broke out in September 1939. During
the Battle of France, in June 1940 at St. Dié in the Vosges Mountains, he
was captured by German soldiers and spent 35 months in prisoner-of-war
camps doing forced labor under the Nazis. As Cartier-Bresson put it, he
was forced to perform "thirty-two different kinds of hard manual labor."
He worked "as slowly and as poorly as possible." He twice tried and
failed to escape from the prison camp, and was punished by solitary
confinement. His third escape was successful and he hid on a farm in
Touraine before getting false papers that allowed him to travel in France.
In France, he worked for the underground, aiding other escapees and
working secretly with other photographers to cover the Occupation and then
the Liberation of France. In 1943, he dug up his beloved Leica camera,
which he had buried in farmland near Vosges. By the time of the armistice,
he was asked by the American Office of War Information to make a
documentary, Le Retour (The Return) about returning French prisoners and
displaced persons.
Toward 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) instead of the posthumous show that MoMA had been
preparing. The show debuted in 1947 together with the publication of his
first book, The Photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Lincoln Kirstein and
Beaumont Newhall wrote the book's text.
In spring 1947, Cartier-Bresson, with Robert Capa, David Seymour, William
"Bill" Vandivert, and George Rodger founded Magnum Photos. Capa's
brainchild, Magnum was a cooperative picture agency owned by its members.
The team split photo assignments among the members. Rodger, who had quit
Life in London after covering World War II, would cover Africa and the
Middle East. Chim, who spoke most European languages, would work in
Europe. Cartier-Bresson would be assigned to India and China. Vandivert,
who had also left Life, would work in America, and Capa would work
anywhere that had an assignment. Maria Eisner managed the Paris office and
Rita Vandivert, Vandivert's wife, managed the New York office and became
Magnum's first president.
Magnum's mission was to "feel the pulse" of the times and some of its
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 arresting, widely viewed images.
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: " "Photographier:
c'est dans un même instant et en une fraction de seconde reconnaître un
fait et l'organisation rigoureuse de formes perçues visuellement qui
expriment et signifient ce fait."
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."
Cartier-Bresson held his first exhibition in France at the Pavillon de
Marsan in the Louvre in 1955 Cartier-Bresson's photography took him many
places on the globe – China, Mexico, Canada, the United States, India,
Japan, Soviet Union and many other countries. He became the first Western
photographer to photograph "freely" in the post-war Soviet Union. In 1968,
he began to turn away from photography and return to his passion for
drawing and painting. Cartier-Bresson withdrew as a principal of Magnum
(which still distributed his photographs) in 1966 to concentrate on
portraiture and landscapes. In 1967, he was divorced from his first wife,
Ratna "Elie". He married photographer Martine Franck, thirty years younger
than himself, in 1970. The couple had a daughter, Mélanie, in May 1972.
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." 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 2003, to preserve and share his legacy.
Cartier-Bresson died in Céreste (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France) in 2004,
at 95. No cause of death was announced. He was buried in the Cimetière de
Montjustin, Alpes de Haute Provence, France. He was survived by his wife,
Martine Franck, and daughter, Mélanie.
Cartier-Bresson spent more than three decades on assignment for Life and
other 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. But many of his most renowned photographs, such as Behind
the Gare St. Lazare, are of ordinary daily life, seemingly unimportant
moments captured and then gone.
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.
In a Charlie Rose interview in 2000, Cartier-Bresson noted that it wasn't
necessarily that he hated to be photographed, but it was that he was
embarrassed by the notion of being photographed for being famous.
Cartier-Bresson believed that what went on beneath the surface was
nobody's business but his own. He did recall that he once confided his
innermost secrets to a Paris taxi driver, certain that he would never meet
the man again.
