Cartier-Bresson, Henri

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Henri Cartier-Bresson

Personal

Born August 22, 1908, in Chanteloup, Seine-et-Marne, France; died August 3, 2004, in I'lle-sur-Sorgue, France; married Ratna Mohini (a dancer), 1937 (marriage ended); married Martine Franck (a photographer), 1970; children: one daughter. Education: Studied painting with Jean Cottenet and Jacques-Emile Blanche, 1922-23, and with Andre Lhote, Paris France, 1927-28; studied painting and literature at Cambridge University, 1928-29.

Career

Photographer, painter, and film maker. Assistant director to Jean Renoir, France, 1936, 1939; Ce Soir, Paris, France, staff photographer, 1937-39; Magnum Photos, cofounder, 1947; director of documentary Le Retour, 1947. Exhibitions: Individual photography exhibitions: Gallery Julien Levy, New York, NY, 1932; Club Atheneo, Madrid, Spain, 1932; Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, Mexico, 1934; Documentary and Anti-Graphic, Gallery Julien Levy, New York, NY, 1935; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (retrospective), 1946, 1968; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1952; Art Institute of Chicago, 1954; Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, France, 1955; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, 1964; Asahi Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, 1965; En France, Grand Palais, Paris, then world tour, 1970; International Center of Photography, New York, NY, 1974, 1979; Fruit Market Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1978; Galerie Delpire, Paris, 1979; Zeit-Foto Salon, Tokyo, 1979, 1980; Kunsthaus, Zurich, Switzerland, 1981; Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Denver, 1981; Art University, Osaka, Japan, 1991; Palazzo Sanvitale, 1992; L'Amerique, FNAC, Paris, 1992; Muséo Camon Aznar, 1992; Hamburg, Germany, 1994; I.C. P., New York, NY 1994; La Caridad, Barcelona, Spain, 1994; National Portrait Gallery, London, 1998; Hayward Gallery, London, 1998; Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris, 2003; and Martin-Gropius-Bau Museum, Berlin, Germany, 2004. Exhibitions of drawings: Carlton Gallery, New York, NY, 1975; Bischofberger Gallery, Zurich, 1976; Forcalquier Galerie, Paris, 1976; Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris, 1981; Muséo Nacional de Belas Artes, Mexico City, 1982; French Institute, Stockholm, Sweden, 1983; Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy, 1983; Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England, 1984; Palais Liechtenstein, Vienna, and Salzburg, Austria, 1985; French Institute, Athens, Greece, 1985; Manheim, Germany, 1986; Herstand Gallery, New York, NY, 1987; École des Beaux Arts, Paris, 1989; Printemps Ginza, Tokyo, 1989; Musée d'Art Moderne, Taiwan, 1991; Parma, Italy, 1992; Saragosse, Logrono, 1993; and La Caridad, Barcelona, 1994. Military service: Served in French Army, 1930 and 1939-43; prisoner of war in Germany, 1940-43.

Member

American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Awards, Honors

Overseas Press Club of America Award, 1948, 1954, 1960, 1964; American Society of Magazine Photographers Award, 1953; Prix de la Société Français de Photographie, 1959; D.Litt., Oxford University, 1975; Culture Prize, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie, 1979; Hasselblad Award, 1983; Novecento Award, 1986; inducted into International Photography Hall of Fame, 2001.

Writings

The Photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, text by Lincoln Kersten, Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), 1947.

The Decisive Moment, Simon and Schuster (New York, NY), 1952.

Les danses a Bali, text by Antonin Artaud, Delpire (Paris, France), 1954.

The Europeans, Simon and Schuster (New York, NY), 1955.

People of Moscow, Thames and Hudson (London, England), 1955.

China in Transition, Thames and Hudson (London, England), 1956.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Fotografie, text by Anna Farova, Statni naklaatelstvi krasne (Prague, Czechoslovakia), 1958.

Photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Grossman (New York, NY), 1963.

China, text by Barbara Miller, Bantam (New York, NY), 1964.

The World of HCB, Viking (New York, NY), 1968.

France, text by François Nourissier, Thames and Hudson (London, England), 1970.

The Face of Asia, introduction by Robert Shapien, John Weatherhill (New York, NY), 1972.

About Russia, Thames and Hudson (London, England), 1973.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Aperture (New York, NY), 1976.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Ritratti, text by Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues and Ferdinando Scianna, Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri (Milan, Italy), 1983.

Photoportraits, text by de Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues, Thames and Hudson (London, England), 1985.

Henri Cartier-Bresson in India, text by Yves Vequaud, Thames and Hudson (London, England), 1987.

L'Autre Chine, Centre National de la Photographie (Paris, France), 1989.

Line by Line: Henri Cartier-Bresson's Drawings, Thames and Hudson (London, England), 1989.

America in Passing, Bullfinch (New York, NY), 1991.

Alberto Giacometti photographie par Henri Cartier-Bresson, Franco Sciardelli (Milan, Italy), 1991.

A propos de Paris, text by Vera Feyder and Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues, Thames and Hudson (London, England), 1994.

Double Regard, text by Jean Leymarie, Le Nycatlope (Amiens, France), 1994.

Mexican Notebooks, text by Carlos Fuentes, Thames and Hudson (London, England), 1994.

Europeans, text by Jean Clair, Thames and Hudson (London, England), 1997.

Tete à tete, text by Ernst H. Gombrich, Thames and Hudson (London, England), 1998.

The Mind's Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers, Aperture (New York, NY), 1999.

Landscape Townscape, text by Erik Orsenna and Gerard Mace, Thames and Hudson (London, England), 2001.

Sidelights

"Once Cartier-Bresson photographed something or someone," wrote Newsweek contributor Malcolm Jones, "you might as well have retired them as subjects: best picture of a man jumping over a puddle, best portrait of Sartre, best image of a picnic." Jones could have gone on with his list to include best shot of a child carrying two huge wine bottles or best picture of proletarian dancers in Moscow or of crowds of Chinese in Shanghai attempting to buy gold. Henri Cartier-Bresson's list of instantly recognizable black-and-white photographs is a long one, yet the French artist, who died in 2004, always claimed that he was not really a photographer at all. To prove his claim, he laid down his Leica in the early 1970s, and, except for the rare assignment, turned wholly to his first artistic passions: painting and drawing.

The world did not forget his work, however. As Sadanand Menon noted in the New International at the time of Cartier-Bresson's death, "For over 45 years, from when he began to work with a camera in 1932 until he stopped taking photographs in the mid-1970s, almost nothing significant seems to have happened in the world without Cartier-Bresson's signature presence there with his battered and taped Leica M 3 camera." In those years before television and the pervasiveness of instant electronic images, the work of Cartier-Bresson and other photojournalists was greedily consumed by the public. He was in Spain for that country's civil war, in Paris for the occupation and liberation in World War II, in China for the communist revolution, in India and Pakistan at the handover from England, in the Soviet Union as it began to lift the Iron Curtain, in Hungary for the 1956 revolution, in Cuba when Castro took over, in Berlin when the Wall went up, and in Prague in 1968. His portraits of famous people define them: he took the final photos of India's Gandhi, just minutes before that leader was assassinated; his portrait of Henri Matisse with birds is iconic. These images have entered the cultural psyche; Cartier-Bresson could not retire from them.

Cartier-Bresson was considered a pioneer of photography and perhaps one of the greatest ever. Writing in Grove Art Online, Mark Haworth-Booth noted that Cartier-Bresson "not only shaped and extended the concept of photography but through it achieved a psychological penetration and formal perfection equal to other kinds of serious image-making." During his lifetime, he was the stuff of legend, and his thousands of photographs have inspired several generations of younger photographers. Jones noted in Newsweek that Cartier-Bresson "set a standard for excellence that has yet to be matched. Art photography, portraiture, photojournalism—there was nothing he could not do with a camera." For Time writer James Nachtwey, Cartier-Bresson "made us see." Nachtwey further explained: "Through his eyes we see the universal in the specific, large issues in small things, mystery in the obvious, poetry in the mundane. We see infinity in the blink of an eye." Such a legacy was no accident, for as Cartier-Bresson himself noted in his book The Decisive Moment, there is a perfect instant for each shot. This moment comes with, as he noted, "the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that even its proper expression." Famed for shooting with available light and without a flash, sometimes even without using a light meter, Cartier-Bresson eschewed dark-room manipulation of his prints. Rather, the moment was caught in a frozen instant of insight by his lens, or not at all. As Vicky Hallett put it in U.S. News and World Report, "Captured through the lens of Henri Cartier-Bresson's 35-millimeter Leica, a photograph was never merely just a picture of a bicycle passing a spiral staircase, or a boy toting wine bottles down a street. It was an instant of serendipity, when subject, geometry, and motion aligned as they never would again." Cartier-Bresson's life also displayed this same serendipity.

Wealthy Origins

Born on August 22, 1908, in Chanteloup, France, Henri Cartier-Bresson came from a family whose wealth, for the French, equaled that of the American Rockefellers. The family was in the thread business on both sides, but this did not stop Cartier-Bresson's uncle or his father from their own artistic pursuits, albeit with the family firm always fore-most in their thoughts. The same was expected of young Henri, but in this respect the rebellious youngster disappointed his parents. Growing up in Paris, he lost interest in his studies, failing to pass the exam for the prestigious Lycée Condorcet. Instead, he was interested in intellectual currents of the day, including the rise of surrealism, Nietzschean and Hindu philosophy, and psychoanalysis. His interest in painting began early, and by the age of twelve he was taking private lessons. One of his instructors introduced the young man to some of the artistic movers and shakers of the day, including Andre Breton, whose writings were shaping the surrealist school. Cartier-Bresson was greatly taken by this revolutionary art movement which held spontaneity as one of the highest goals and which also plumbed the unconscious mind with its strange visions. But most of all, Cartier-Bresson appreciated the social outcast role such surrealists enjoyed.

In the late 1920s Cartier-Bresson began taking lessons with cubist painter Andre Lhote, served a compulsory years in the French Army, and then went to Africa. There he landed in the French Ivory Coast and headed for the interior, intending to make his living as a big-game hunter. Instead he caught malaria; after a year tramping in Africa, Cartier-Bresson returned to Europe, where he traveled in Central European countries. The rough-and-tumble life in Africa dissuaded him from a career in painting, but seeing a photograph of native boys diving into an African lake, he realized that photography was the medium for him.

Have Leica, Will Travel

In 1932 he bought a Leica camera small enough to hold in the hand and set about to hunt images to capture with it. He would use the Leica brand for the rest of his career, learning how to use it in a matter of days and forsaking such photographic equipment as the flash or tripod. Not long after purchasing the camera, he shot one of his most famous images, Behind Gare St. Lazar, "an iconic vision of a shadowy figure leaping across a puddle," as Hallett described the photo. Here at the very outset of his career were the ingredients of what would make Cartier-Bresson famous: the perfect moment captured in mid-action, with the photographer perfectly positioned as if, as Cartier-Bresson was fond of saying, he did not take the picture, rather the picture took him. As a writer for the Economist noted, Cartier-Bresson "framed and preserved [such] less famous moments, elevating them with his genius so that they somehow seemed to capture the essence of life itself." Haworth-Booth noted of these early images that Cartier-Bresson "brought elements from Post-Impressionism and Surrealism to bear on the new technology in photographs taken first in the streets of Paris, then during his travels in Italy and Spain."

Cartier-Bresson did indeed travel in the next years, capturing street scenes in Spain, such as Madrid and Seville, both from 1933, and Callejon of the Valencia Arena, one of his most famous photos, showing a man looking through the wooden gate into a bull-fight arena. The sun is caught and reflected in one of the lenses of the man's glasses to make it appear as if the person has a hole in his head. Further travels in Mexico yielded Alicante and photos of the prostitutes if the Calle Cuahtemocztin. In 1935 Cartier-Bresson moved on to New York, where he exhibited with the American photographer Walker Evans, and where he first became interested in the possibilities of the cinema with fellow photographer Paul Strand.

Returning to France, he worked as an assistant to legendary film director Jean Renoir on films including La vie est a nous and Le regle du jeu, the latter in which the photographer also played the part of the English butler. Except for the post-war documentary Le Retour, and a couple of television documentaries in the United States, this was the extent of Cartier-Bresson's involvement in film. In 1937 he married Javanese dancer Ratna Mohini, and needing a steady income took a job as staff photographer for the leftist newspaper Ce Soir. There he met two other journalists who would prove important in his life: Robert Capa and David Seymour. He also continued his own photography of the everyday in addition to his photojournalism.

With the outbreak of World War II Cartier-Bresson joined the military, serving in a film and photography unit. Captured in 1940, he was shipped to Germany as a prisoner of war. After several unsuccessful attempts, he finally escaped and made his way back to Paris in 1943, joining the Resistance there until the liberation of his country in 1945. His philosophy of catching the exact right moment is demonstrated in his 1945 picture Dessau: Exposing a Gestapo Informer. According to Haworth-Booth, "few photographs of the 20th century encompass so much of its history. The image perfectly fulfills the aesthetics of the 'decisive moment.'"

Life after the War

Following the war, Cartier-Bresson established the photographic cooperative and agency Magnum, together with Capa and Seymour. He worked on assignments from India to China and Cuba. His photos had by this time become symbols of the twentieth century, were exhibited worldwide, and filled the pages of the many of photo books he published. In 1952 he published his book on photographic theory, The Decisive Moment, but always maintained a humble opinion of himself, noting that he was an amateur when it came to photography. Cartier-Bresson was one of the first Westerners allowed in the Soviet Union after a small thaw in the Cold War; his book People of Moscow details that

trip, as does his 1956 China in Transition for that other Communist country.

By 1966 Cartier-Bresson had grown weary of his duties at Magnum and left the agency, and from 1974 on he devoted himself primarily to drawing, his first love. He explained at the time that for him photography was "instant drawing," and he preferred the real thing. Remarried in 1970, Cartier-Bresson did not leave photography totally behind: his new wife was a photographer. He spent the remaining three decades of his life anonymously, living in Paris and in the south of France, preferring not to be photographed. He drew in the Louvre, published his drawings, and had many exhibitions.

However, in the final analysis, it was photography for which he was known and for which he will always be known. He was one of the true innovators of the photographic image, a "documentary photographer with a boxer's timing and an artist's eye," as Sarah Boxer noted in the Smithsonian. The 15,000 rolls of film he shot during his career document and give image to an entire generation. For Boxer there is always an "indecisiveness" to a Cartier-Bresson photograph. This quality is, in fact, according to Boxer, "a hallmark of many classic Cartier-Bresson shots. They are beautifully, even obsessively composed, yet when it comes to pinpointing what is going on, psychologically or even factually, they seldom yield." Boxer concluded that it is exactly this uncertainty that allows many of his pictures to function as icons "of postwar anxiety."

If you enjoy the works of Henri Cartier-Bresson

If you enjoy the works of Henri Cartier-Bresson, you may also want to check out the following:

The images of pioneering photojournalists George Rodger (1908--), David Seymour (1911-1956), and Robert Capa (1913-1954).

The year before his death in 2004, Cartier-Bresson was honored with a huge show at Paris's Bibliotheque Nationale de France. Describing the exhibition in Time International, Judy Fayard noted that Cartier-Bresson's "powerful black-and-white, natural-light photographs—formally rigorous, timeless and often enigmatic—adorn the BNF's vast exhibit space…. Here is the master class." At the

time of the photographer's death, no less a personage than French President Jacques Chirac joined in the mourning. As quoted in the Economist, Chirac said of his late compatriot: "With him, France loses a genius photographer, a true master, and one of the most gifted artists of his generation."

Biographical and Critical Sources

books

Bonnefoy, Yves, Henri Cartier-Bresson Photographer, Bullfinch (New York, NY), 1979.

Boot, Chris, editor, Magnum Stories, Phaidon Press (Boston, MA), 2005.

Clair, Jean, Line by Line: The Drawings of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Thames & Hudson, 1989.

Galassi, Peter, Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Work, Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), 1987.

Galassi, Peter, and others, Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Man, the Image, and the World, Thames and Hudson (London, England), 2003.

Montier, Jean-Pierre, Henri Cartier-Bresson and the Artless Art, Thames and Hudson (London, England), 1994.

periodicals

Artforum International, May, 2003, Miriam Rosen, "Henri Cartier-Bresson: Bibliotheque Nationale de France," p. 66.

Booklist, December 1, 1998, Ray Olson, review of Tete à tete, p. 643.

Economist, August 22, 1998, "Man of the Moment," p. 67; April 19, 2003, "Regarding Henri."

Library Journal, November 15, 1998, David Bryant, review of Tete à tete, p. 63; May 15, 2000, Douglas F. Smith, review of The Mind's Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers, p. 88.

New Statesman, November 27, 1998, Charles Darwent, "Master of the Frozen Moment," p. 40.

Newsweek, June 2, 2003, Malcolm Jones, "The Man of the Moment," p. 56.

People, July 9, 2001, "Cheap Shots?," p. 115.

Print, January-February, 1999, Fred Ritchin, reviews of Europeans and Tete à tete, p. 32.

PSA Journal, January, 1992, George W. Cushman, review of America in Passing, p. 9; January, 2001, "Photography Hall of Fame Announces Latest Inductees," p. 9.

Smithsonian, November, 2003, Sarah Boxer, "Magic Moments," p. 21.

Time International, May 5, 2003, Judy Fayard, "Eternity in an Instant," p. 54.