Henri Cartier-Bresson

French photographer

• Born: August 22, 1908
• Birthplace: Chanteloup, France
• Died: August 3, 2004
• Place of death: Céreste, France

Cartier-Bresson, whose photography was acclaimed both for its immediacy and its human authenticity, contributed a body of work unique in the history of the craft. Aside from his emphasis on the typical and ordinary in his choice of subjects, his use of the new, smaller hand-held camera and faster films defined the idea of “the decisive moment” in photography.

Early Life

Henri Cartier-Bresson (ahn-ree kahr-tyay-breh-son) was born to André Cartier-Bresson, a wealthy Parisian textile manufacturer descended from a family who had been in the thread-making business since the mid-nineteenth century. His mother, Marthe Leverdier, came from a family of Norman landowners who had entered the cotton industry in the 1840’s. His younger brother eventually took over the family business, and his sister became a poet.

Throughout his early years, Cartier-Bresson spent a considerable amount of time in the Norman countryside but was educated in Paris at the École Fénelon and then at the Lycée Condorcet, from which he graduated in 1927. Drawn to a life of adventure, he had little interest in the family textile business, and he often made use of the Kodak Brownie camera he received as a young boy. He used the camera to record the everyday scenes that he witnessed around him.

With his father’s approval and encouragement, Cartier-Bresson set out to realize a long-standing and passionate desire. His uncle, Louis, was a talented painter who had introduced thirteen-year-old Cartier-Bresson to the art, and so the youth wanted to become a painter himself. He traveled to Paris and studied with cubist painter André Lhote from 1927 to 1929 and then with Jacques Émile Blanche, a noted portraitist.

The predominance of Surrealism in French art and literature during Cartier-Bresson’s youth inevitably affected his aesthetic development and reinforced his strong belief in the power of the imagination. Also, he read widely in modern literature and philosophy, including the works of such writers as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Arthur Rimbaud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, and Karl Marx.

In 1929, during eight months of study at Cambridge University in England, Cartier-Bresson explored both English literature and painting. Returning to France in 1930 for compulsory military service, he continued painting while stationed at Le Bourget near Paris. However, he continued to use his Brownie box camera, renewing his earlier interest in photography.

Life’s Work

In 1931, after his release from the army, Cartier-Bresson spent about a year in Africa hunting wild game and selling the meat to earn a living. A severe case of blackwater fever, a form of malaria, that he contracted while living in a native village on the Ivory Coast compelled him to depart for Marseilles to convalesce. There, through experiments with a Leica camera, which he had acquired in 1930, he became more fully aware of the artistic potential of the photographic medium. Combining that newly discovered creative outlet with his adventurous and independent spirit, he became a freelance photojournalist.

Over the next few years, Cartier-Bresson traveled widely throughout France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, and the United States, selling whatever photographs he could to magazines and newspapers. Because of the relatively small market for photographs at the time, he was forced to frequent cheap hotels and restaurants. Gradually, however, Cartier-Bresson began to win recognition for his photographic expertise and especially for his uniquely powerful concrete images of ordinary people engaged in typical, rather than unusual, activities.

Cartier-Bresson’s first works were exhibited at the Gallery Julien Levy in New York in 1932, followed by presentations of his first great reportage photos by Ignacio Sanchez Mejias and Guillermo de Torre at the Club Atheneo in Madrid in 1933. In 1934, he had a joint exhibition with Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo at the Palacio Bellas Artes in Mexico City. Some of Cartier-Bresson’s finest early pictures were taken while living in that city’s slum district after the end of the photographic exhibition that had brought him to Mexico.

Cartier-Bresson spent the following year in the United States, where he met the renowned American photographer Paul Strand, who was then devoted to filmmaking and who aroused in the French visitor some of his own interest in motion pictures. The next year, back in France, Cartier-Bresson worked for director Jean Renoir as an actor in Une Partie de campagne (A Day in the Country, 1950), produced in 1936 and released in 1946. Cartier-Bresson later acted in and helped to direct the masterpiece La Règle du jeu (1939; The Rules of the Game, 1950). His association with Renoir was exceedingly rewarding for Cartier-Bresson, who later maintained that Renoir, along with Lhote, had taught him everything he knew. So powerful was Renoir’s influence that Cartier-Bresson abandoned still photography almost entirely for a while, devoting himself instead to motion pictures, even though he later acknowledged his limited ability in the latter medium. His early artistic influences also included photographers Eugène Atget, Man Ray, and André Kertész.

In 1937, Cartier-Bresson married Javanese dancer Ratna Mohini (a marriage that eventually ended in divorce) and directed his own film, Victoire de la vie (victory of life), a documentary about medical aid to the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War. Assigned to report on the coronation of King George VI in London for the French weekly Regards, he returned to his true talent later that year. By ignoring the pageantry of the coronation itself and photographing instead the anonymous ordinary people in the crowds lining the route of the royal procession, he produced a remarkable series of pictures that is still regarded as classic. This oblique approach to historic events, typified by his treatment of the coronation, is considered to be one of the hallmarks of his work.

Cartier-Bresson worked for the French communist newspaper Ce Soir from 1937 to 1939. Then, with the outbreak of World War II , he was drafted into the army and served as a corporal in the film and photographic unit. Taken prisoner by the Germans in 1940, he spent thirty-six months in prisoner-of-war camps but managed to escape on his third attempt. On a farm in Touraine, he hid as a laborer until he could acquire false papers that allowed him to return to Paris. Back in Paris, he photographed artists such as Henri Matisse and Georges Braque as well as writers for publisher Pierre Braun. During this time, he joined an underground resistance movement created to aid other prisoners of war and escapees. In 1944, he organized an underground photographic unit, consisting mainly of French press photographers, to provide pictorial documentation of the German occupation, the Allied invasion of France, and the subsequent German retreat.

At the request of the U.S. Office of War Information, Cartier-Bresson directed his second film, Le Retour (1944-1945; the return), a documentary about the homecoming of French prisoners of war and deportees. This film has been described as one of the most moving documents to have emerged from World War II. Cartier-Bresson returned to the United States in 1946 to complete what had been considered a posthumous exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; curators, and others, believed that Cartier-Bresson had disappeared in the war.

In 1947, Cartier-Bresson, along with Robert Capa, David Seymour, and George Rodger, founded a cooperative agency called Magnum Photos. The three had first met in Spain during the days of the Spanish Civil War and then reunited later in Paris. Their agency was created to realize what was a common goal: to take photographs that were restrained, soft in contrast, accidental, and gently lyrical while also being harshly real. Their subject matter was not only the “big” historical events but also the seemingly trivial events of everyday life. Assigned to cover India and China for Magnum, Cartier-Bresson won wide recognition for his photographs of Mahatma Gandhi’s funeral in 1948 and of the closing months of the Chinese civil war.

In the three decades following the founding of Magnum Photos, Cartier-Bresson traveled throughout the world in search of new subjects, traversing Europe and America repeatedly and also visiting many countries in Asia and Africa, especially China, Japan, and India. Equipped with his favorite camera, a vintage Model-G Leica, he assumed the role of “photoreporter” without assignments, occasionally using the pseudonym Hank Carter in an effort to protect the anonymity that he believed was vital to capturing his subjects unaffected and unposed.

The individual shots and photographic essays resulting from Cartier-Bresson’s journeys appeared in most of the world’s leading magazines and also have formed the basis for several impressive volumes of work. More than one hundred of his most memorable early photographs are contained in Images à la Sauvette (1952; The Decisive Moment , 1952). In this work, Cartier-Bresson wrote thirteen pages of text that one photographer called some of “the most intelligent and lucid writing about photography” that he had encountered. In it, Cartier-Bresson describes his artistic criterion as “the simultaneous recognition in a fraction of a second of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms.” No work epitomizes the decisive moment better than his photograph taken in 1932 behind a Paris railroad station: It shows a well-dressed man leaping from a horizontal ladder just as his forward foot is about to enter a large mud puddle. An intimate view of a quotidian misadventure, it became one of his signature works. Even less dramatic photographs, such as his portraits of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, poet Ezra Pound, and novelist William Faulkner, came to be regarded as defining images of their subjects.

Major exhibitions of Cartier-Bresson’s work in museums and galleries also made him internationally recognized. In 1954, the Louvre in Paris abandoned a long-held prejudice against photography by making his pictures the subject of its first photographic exhibition. Honored once again in 1966, he became the first photographer in history to have a second one-man show at the Louvre. The 270 prints of the second exhibition drew record-breaking crowds in Japan for the duplicate show Henri Cartier-Bresson: Exhibition of Photographs After the Decisive Moment. The Museum of Modern Art in New York also gave him two noteworthy one-man shows, in 1947 and 1968. Also, a 1969 exhibition of his work in England opened at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in the early spring and toured the museums and galleries of major British cities until the end of November.

Cartier-Bresson had occasionally worked in films since the early 1960’s, producing such documentaries as Impressions of California (1969-1970) and Southern Exposures (1969-1970). In 1970, he married photographer Martine Franck. Two years later they had a daughter, Mélanie. After 1973, Cartier-Bresson began photographing less frequently, concentrating instead on drawing and painting. His first exhibition of drawings was at New York’s Carlton Gallery in 1975. In 2002 his family inaugurated the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson to maintain his legacy in photography and art.

When viewed superficially, Cartier-Bresson’s photographic technique appears to be simple and casual. Avoiding elaborate equipment, color film, filters, and posed shots taken from unusual angles or perspectives, he almost always used his Leica’s standard 50-mm lens, almost always holding his camera at eye level. Instead of cropping his negatives, he relied on his personal vision to give his pictures their structure and organization.

Although some critics have argued that his approach may result in amateurish photos or snapshots no different from those taken by any well-equipped tourist, most feel that the unique quality of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs derives from his compassion for the people he has photographed. His work is characterized by an intuitive grasp of the essence of human nature and also by a profound respect for people as indicated by his assertion that there are photographs he would never take, regardless of the circumstances, because of the possibility of intruding on feelings or experiences too intimate to be shared with the world at large. Photography, for Cartier-Bresson, was a way to understand what he saw. Maintaining that pictures took him, he preferred to choose his subjects spontaneously, unlike those photographers who prefer assignments planned in advance. He patiently awaited what he called “the decisive moment,” or the moment when the exterior and interior visions merged in the single eye of the camera lens. It was only then, almost automatically and without awareness of the physical process of adjusting his equipment, that he snapped the picture.

Among Cartier-Bresson’s many honors and distinctions are the 1948 award from U.S. Camera for his photographic essay on the death of Gandhi; the 1953 American Society of Magazine Photographers’ Award for most contributions to the progress of magazine photography; the 1958 award of the Photographic Society of America for international understanding through photography; Overseas Press Club awards for his reportage from China, the Soviet Union, and Cuba; the 1959 Prix de la Société Française de Photographie; the 1974 Culture Prize from Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie; the 1981 Grand Prix National de la Photographie; the 1982 Hasselblad Award; and the 2006 Prix Nada, awarded posthumously for Henri Cartier-Bresson: Scrapbook. From 1952 to 1953, he worked in Europe, and in 1954 he became the first foreign photographer to be admitted to the Soviet Union after the end of the Stalin era. In 1975, he received an honorary doctorate of letters from Oxford University in England.

Although Cartier-Bresson took few photographs during the last three decades of his life, his reputation as a pioneer and master never faltered. Exhibitions throughout the world honored him on his ninetieth birthday in 1998, yet even with his artistic success and wide acquaintance with prominent figures of his age, Cartier-Bresson remained bashful and self-effacing. In 2004, at age ninety-five, he died in Céreste, France, survived by his wife and daughter.

Significance

Although he rejected the label photojournalist, proclaiming that he had no interest in documentation, Cartier-Bresson had, nevertheless, a great impact on an entire generation of photojournalists and documentary photographers. During a career spanning five decades, he captured an era on film. While formed by the values of the nineteenth century, he recorded the twentieth century not in all its historical detail but in its significance and emotional essence. The humane depth of his work made him a central figure in the most celebrated popular exhibition of his times: Of the 502 photographs that Edward Steichen selected for his Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955, ten were by Cartier-Bresson.

Cartier-Bresson’s ability to perceive and capture the essential is, perhaps, partly the result of his early training in painting and composition and possibly the result of his interest in Zen Buddhism, but it came as well from a personal desire to appreciate life in all its manifold forms. Cartier-Bresson’s photographs are characterized by their simplicity and understatement, but, as photographer Ernst Haas has noted commenting on the work of Cartier-Bresson “there is nothing more difficult than to be simple. It is the highest abstraction in life and in photography.”

Bibliography

Arbaïzar, Philippe, et al. Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Man, the Image, and the World A Retrospective. London: Thames & Hudson, 2003. This book accompanied an exhibition of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs in commemoration of his ninety-fifth birthday. Features essays about his life and work and includes six hundred of his photographs.

Assouline, Pierre. Henri Cartier-Bresson: A Biography. Translated by David Wilson. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2005. Assouline, a friend of Cartier-Bresson, presents a portrait of the photographer, summarizing his life, work, and philosophy.

Beaton, Cecil, and Gail Buckland. The Magic Image: The Genius of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day. Boston: Little, Brown, 1975. A well-written history of photography that includes a concise but informative overview of Cartier-Bresson’s career along with a brief biographical sketch. Appendixes on various types of photography. Glossary and index.

Cartier-Bresson, Henri. The Decisive Moment. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1952. Containing some of his most memorable photographs, this collection of Cartier-Bresson’s work in China, Java, India, and North Africa is equally noteworthy for its thirteen-page introduction, written by Cartier-Bresson, on his theory of photography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. An Inner Silence: The Portraits of Henri Cartier-Bresson. London: Thames & Hudson, 2006. Reproductions of ninety-seven of Cartier-Bresson’s portraits that were featured in the first exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris. Includes a foreword and introduction examining his work and legacy.

Haas, Ernst. “Henri Cartier-Bresson: A Lyrical View of Life.” Modern Photography 60 (November, 1971): 88-136. Haas, widely recognized as one of the world’s outstanding contemporary photographers, gives an insightful and interesting inside view of the life and work of his colleague. Haas offers personal anecdotes, biographical information, as well as a guide to Cartier-Bresson’s theory and practice of photography.

Hofstadter, Dan. “Stealing a March on the World.” Parts 1 and 2. The New Yorker, October 23-October 30, 1989. This detailed article on Cartier-Bresson provides good biographical information as well as a close look into the artist’s daily activities.