Cartier-Bresson, Henri
born August 22, 1908, Chanteloup, France
died August 3, 2004, Céreste
French photographer whose humane, spontaneous photographs helped
establish photojournalism as an art form. His theory that photography
can capture the meaning beneath outward appearance in instants of
extraordinary clarity is perhaps best expressed in his book Images
à la sauvette (1952; The Decisive Moment).
Cartier-Bresson was born and attended school in a village not
far from Paris. In 1927–28 he studied in Paris with André
Lhote, an artist and critic associated with the Cubist movement.
Lhote implanted in him a lifelong interest in painting, a crucial
factor in the education of his vision. In 1929 Cartier-Bresson went
to the University of Cambridge, where he studied literature and
painting.
As a boy, Cartier-Bresson had been initiated into the mysteries
of the simple “Brownie” snapshot camera. But his first serious
concern with the medium occurred about 1930, after seeing the work
of two major 20th-century photographers, Eugène Atget and
Man Ray. Making use of a small allowance, he traveled in Africa
in 1931, where he lived in the bush, recording his experiences with
a miniature camera. There he contracted blackwater fever, necessitating
his return to France. The portability of a small camera and the
ease with which one could record instantaneous impressions must
have struck a sympathetic chord, for in 1933 he purchased his first
35-mm Leica. The use of this type of camera was particularly relevant
to Cartier-Bresson. It lent itself not only to spontaneity but to
anonymity as well. So much did Cartier-Bresson wish to remain a
silent, and even unseen, witness, that he covered the bright chromium
parts of his camera with black tape to render it less visible, and
he sometimes hid the camera under a handkerchief. The man was similarly
reticent about his life and work.
Photograph:Hyères, France, gelatin silver print by Henri
Cartier-Bresson, …
Hyères, France, gelatin silver print by Henri Cartier-Bresson,
…
Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago, All Rights Reserved,
Julien Levy Collection, gift of Jean and Julien Levy, 1975.1134
In more than 40 years as a photographer, Cartier-Bresson wandered
continually around the world. But there was nothing compulsive about
his travels, and he explicitly expressed a desire to move slowly,
to “live on proper terms” in each country, to take his time, so
that he became totally immersed in the environment.
In 1937 Cartier-Bresson produced a documentary film, his first,
on medical aid in the Spanish Civil War. The date also marked his
first reportage photographs made for newspapers and magazines. His
enthusiasm for filmmaking was further gratified when, from 1936
to 1939, he worked as an assistant to the film director Jean Renoir
in the production of Une Partie de campagne (A Day in the Country)
and La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game). As a photographer
he felt indebted to the great films he saw as a youth. They taught
him, he said, to choose precisely the expressive moment, the telling
viewpoint. The importance he gave to sequential images in still
photography may be attributed to his preoccupation with film.
In 1940, during World War II, Cartier-Bresson was taken prisoner
by the Germans. He escaped in 1943 and the following year participated
in a French underground photographic unit assigned to record the
German occupation and retreat. In 1945 he made a film for the U.S.
Office of War Information, Le Retour, which dealt with the return
to France of released prisoners of war and deportees.
Though Cartier-Bresson's photographs had been exhibited in 1933
in the prestigious Julien Levy Gallery in New York City, a more
important tribute was paid to him in 1947, when a one-man exhibition
was held in that city's Museum of Modern Art. In that same year,
Cartier-Bresson, in partnership with the U.S. photographer Robert
Capa and others, founded the cooperative photo agency known as Magnum
Photos. The organization offered periodicals global coverage by
some of the most talented photojournalists of the time. Under the
aegis of Magnum, Cartier-Bresson concentrated more than ever on
reportage photography. The following three years found him in India,
China, Indonesia, and Egypt. This material and more, taken in the
1950s in Europe, formed the subjects of several books published
between 1952 and 1956. Such publications helped considerably to
establish Cartier-Bresson's reputation as a master of his craft.
One of them, and perhaps the best known, Images à la sauvette,
contains what is probably Cartier-Bresson's most comprehensive and
important statement on the meaning, technique, and utility of photography.
The title refers to a central idea in his work—the decisive moment—the
elusive instant when, with brilliant clarity, the appearance of
the subject reveals in its essence the significance of the event
of which it is a part, the most telling organization of forms. Later
books include Cartier-Bresson's France (1971), The Face of Asia
(1972), and About Russia (1974).
He was singularly honoured by his own country in 1955, when a
retrospective exhibition of 400 of his photographs was held at the
Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris and was then displayed in Europe,
the United States, and Japan before the photographs were finally
deposited in the Bibliothèque Nationale (National Library)
in Paris. In 1963 he photographed in Cuba; in 1963–64, in Mexico;
and in 1965, in India. The French filmmaker Louis Malle recalled
that, during the student revolt in Paris in May 1968 Cartier-Bresson
appeared with his 35-mm camera and, despite the explosive activities,
took photographs at the rate of only about four per hour.
In the late 1960s Cartier-Bresson began to concentrate on making
motion pictures—including Impressions of California (1969) and Southern
Exposures (1971). He believed that still photography and its use
in pictorial magazines was, to a large extent, being superseded
by television. On principle, he always avoided developing his own
prints, convinced that the technical exigencies of photography were
a harmful distraction. Similarly, he directed the shooting of films
and did not wield the camera himself. With this medium, however,
he was no longer able to work unobtrusively by himself. Cartier-Bresson
devoted his later years to drawing.
His Leica—his notebook, as he called it—accompanied him wherever
he went, and, consistent with his training as a painter, he always
carried a small sketch pad. There was for Cartier-Bresson a kind
of social implication in the camera. To his mind, photography provided
a means, in an increasingly synthetic epoch, for preserving the
real and humane world.
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