Henri Cartier-Bresson

photographer

One of the giants of twentieth-century photography, Henri Cartier-Bresson could also be described as the seminal figure of the post-war era, both for his own achievements and for the far-reaching influence of his photographic sensibility. Described by the New York Times as ‘the archetype of the roving photojournalist’, he was also a succinct portraitist, capturing newsworthy figures such as the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, the writer Jean-Paul Sartre and the Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi in what would become iconic portraits. He was a photographic visionary who co-founded the now legendary photo agency Magnum Photos and pioneered the concept of the ‘decisive moment’.
Well illustrated by the 1932 work Behind Saint-Lazare Station, Paris, France, which shows a man jumping in the middle of a flooded street, captured in the split second before his heel hits the water’s surface, Cartier-Bresson’s unique photographic sensibility put forward the idea of the ”decisive moment” – the precise moment when a particular set of events, as observed through the frame of the lens, coheres into the best possible photograph, balanced in composition and other formal elements, capturing a photographic reality that freezes and thus abstracts the ”real world’’. Cartier-Bresson often described his philosophy as follows: “To take a photograph is to hold one’s breath when all one’s faculties converge in the face of a fleeting reality. It is at this moment that the mastery of an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”
What distinguishes Cartier-Bresson’s vision from the many other photographers who sought to capture ideal moments, often perpetuating clichés instead, was his ability to pre-visualise and pre-edit the image so that it would be rich and resonant, rather than merely capturing a suspended moment.
The famous photograph of Saint-Lazare station is full of remarkable, even uncanny detail. Posters in the centre repeat the leaping figure and its reflection in the water; the man has ejected himself from a ladder-like structure that mimics a railway track, and so on.
Cartier-Bresson was seldom accused of taking ‘lucky shots’ from his many exposures, as he was famous for shooting judiciously, often exposing only a few frames during events when other photojournalists would shoot many rolls.
Henri Cartier-Bresson was born on 22 August 1908 in Chanteloup-en-Brie, Seine-et-Marne, the eldest of five children. His father was a textile manufacturer of considerable wealth, but the household was run as one of modest means, to the point that as a boy Cartier-Bresson had little idea of the family’s resources, which included extensive land holdings in Normandy, where he spent summers.
He was educated in Paris at the Lycée Condorcet, where he read avidly but received no formal photographic training. He was introduced to the medium as a potential career when, as a teenager, he saw the photographs of Martin Munkácsi who impressed him with their beauty and potential.
He did, however, study painting in 1927-28 with André Lhote, an early practitioner of Cubism; it was Lhote, Cartier-Bresson claimed, who taught him everything he knew about photography through his training in close and imaginative observation and learning from art history.
He was also deeply impressed by the work of the Surrealist artists who were then beginning to dominate the Paris art world. He studied English literature and art at Cambridge University in London, until he was drafted into the French army in 1930.
After his discharge, full of poetry and literature and in search of adventure, he went hunting in the French colony of the Ivory Coast. It was here that he took his first photographs with a Brownie he had been given, and the pursuit of game as a metaphor for photography, which he often used in his writing and speaking about the medium, was born.
However, he contracted blackwater fever and nearly died. His photographs were also lost. Returning to Marseille to recover, he bought his first professional camera, a Leica, with which he took up photography in earnest when he had the opportunity to travel the continent with friends.
His first exhibition was in Madrid, but by 1935 he was in New York, where he exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery. It was in New York that he met Paul Strand, who was making films at the time. Inspired by Strand, on his return to France, Cartier-Bresson secured the position of second assistant on Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country and The Rules of the Game. He was also involved in a propaganda film made by the famous director for the French Communist Party, which denounced France’s prominent families, including Cartier-Bresson’s own. Cartier-Bresson did not join the Communist Party, but he had a lifelong sympathy for the oppressed and demoralised lower classes, which was often reflected in his choice of subject matter.
In 1940, during the German invasion of France, Cartier-Bresson, a corporal in the army’s film and photography unit, was captured. He spent nearly three years in prisoner-of-war camps, escaping twice and being recaptured and returned to hard labour, which he later claimed was a useful lesson. His third escape attempt, in 1943, was successful, and he hid out on a farm in Touraine until he obtained false papers that allowed him to travel to France, where he resumed photography as a member of the Resistance. He set up a photographic department within the French underground to document the German occupation and its eventual withdrawal, an experience that certainly shaped his ideas about the Magnum photographic agency when it was founded in 1947, and photographed such luminaries as the artists Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.
After the liberation of France in 1944, the United States Office of War Information commissioned Cartier-Bresson to make a film about the homecoming of French prisoners and deportees. After completing this well-received film, Le Retour (The Return), Cartier-Bresson went back to New York City, where a retrospective was being planned at the Museum of Modern Art as a tribute to his belief that he had been killed in the war. He was thus able to work on his own ‘posthumous’ exhibition, and he also took time to travel around the United States, taking such characteristic pictures as Harlem, Easter Sunday, 1947, which shows a beautiful African-American woman wearing a satin flowered hat framed by the architectural details of a modest brick building, which combine with the shapes of the hat to create an even more elaborate chapeau.
On his return to Paris in 1947, he learned that his colleagues Robert Capa, David Seymour (Chim), William Vandivert and George Rodger had drawn up plans for a cooperative photographic agency with offices in New York, Paris and other world capitals. Called Magnum Photos, the organising group appointed Cartier-Bresson to its board of directors, knowing that he was like-minded and aware of his considerable prestige. He was put in charge of assignments in the Far East, and his insistence on small-format cameras, no flash, tripods or telephoto lenses, and the integrity of the image as photographed – no darkroom manipulation – became the gold standard for post-war photojournalism, as well as being highly influential in fine art photography.
The late 1940s saw Cartier-Bresson’s rise as an international photojournalist. For Magnum he travelled to China, India – where he photographed Gandhi literally minutes before his assassination – and Indonesia, photographing political events and people in their streets and homes. Extraordinary ‘decisive moments’ were captured, such as Gold Sale, Shanghai, China, 1949, which shows a human ”rope”: Chinese peasants with their arms braided and intertwined, tying themselves to the steps of a building. Taken during the Communist takeover of China in 1948-49, this remarkable composition captures a run on a bank selling gold; the crowd is not controlled by any authority, but by its own nature of panic and excitement in the face of great events.
By 1952, Cartier-Bresson had returned to Europe and was at last gaining recognition in his native country.
His first book, Images à la sauvette (with the English title The Decisive Moment), with a cover by Matisse, was published. He began a long collaboration with the eminent art publisher Robert Delpire, including a book on Balinese theatre, Les Danses à Bali, with text by Antonin Artaud. His book Les Européens, with a cover by the painter Joan Miró, was also published, and in 1955 he was given his first exhibition in France at the Louvre.
The 1960s were again a period of intense international travel. He returned to Mexico, where he had made one of his first photographic forays as part of an ethnographic team in the early 1930s.
On assignment for Life magazine, he travelled to Cuba at a time of high tension between that country and the United States. He visited Japan and returned to India. In 1966, Cartier-Bresson ended his relationship with Magnum Photos, claiming that he had stayed with the agency ”two years too long” and admitting to critics that he had perhaps said all he had to say through photography. Although he took on occasional commissions, such as the IBM Corporation’s Man and Machine, he returned to his early passion for painting and drawing. After divorcing his wife of 30 years, the Javanese dancer Ratna Mohini he married Magnum photographer Martine Franck in 1970.
After 1974, he photographed very little, and then often surreptitiously, using the technique he had perfected during his long career as a photojournalist, working with a small camera that he often minimised by covering with black tape any metal parts that might reflect light and attract attention.
On the occasion of a retrospective of his work at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2003, and on the eve of his 95th birthday, Cartier-Bresson, together with his wife Martine Frank and their daughter, inaugurated the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, which they had conceived several years earlier to “preserve and share the legacy of his work”. Housed in a historic studio in Paris, the Foundation archives Cartier-Bresson’s vintage prints and contact sheets, as well as publications, rare books, albums, posters, exhibition invitations, and films and videos documenting the photographer’s career. The HCB Foundation also awards a prize named after Cartier-Bresson, organises and distributes exhibitions of his work and maintains a comprehensive website at www.henricartierbresson.org.
Magnum Photos also distributes photographs by Cartier-Bresson. Henri Cartier-Bresson died on 5 August 2004 in the South of France.

BIBLIOGRAPHY IN THE LIBRARY