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Henri Cartier-Bresson

“The simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organisation of forms, which gives that event its proper expression… In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotif.” - Henri Cartier-Bresson

Born on August 22 1908 in Chanteloup-en-Brie near Paris, France to a family of five children, Henri Cartier-Bresson is considered the father of modern photojournalism and one of the, if not the most pivotal chief instigator of the 35mm film format. Like Claude Debussy is to modern motion picture soundtracks, Cartier-Bresson’s work epitomised the beginning of the gritty ‘street photography’ style that has stayed dominant till today.

Cartier-Bresson, though a photographer of renown, hated to be photographed. For him, his treasure was his privacy, which is why there are few and far between photos that portray him in any way that have made their way to the public. His sense of privacy was such that when he accepted an honorary degree from Oxford University (1975), he actually held out a paper to hide his face from being photographed. He once revealed his innermost secrets to a Paris cab driver, knowing for certain that he would never meet him again.

Degas once said, “It’s wonderful to be famous as long as you remain unknown,” a remark that Cartier-Bresson took to heart and thrived to be invisible to the attention of others. In the United States, Cartier-Bresson was known to travel at times under an alias, Hank Carter.

Cartier-Bresson came from an affluent family whose wealth was tied to textile manufacturing. His father created the family name that was to be the standard in French sewing threads while his mother’s Normandy descent hailed from cotton merchants and landowners and it was there that young Cartier-Bresson spent his initial childhood. With such affluence, there was no problem for Cartier-Bresson to pretty much do what his passion directed him to.

The early development years

Cartier-Bresson studied at the Parisian Catholic École Fénelon school where in his formative years he took to his uncle Louis whom he regarded as father-like to him. It was his uncle – his father’s brother – who took him to his studio during the Christmas holidays in 1913 where he was introduced to oil painting. His first obsession was thence founded in painting where Cartier-Bresson lived and breathed the scent of oil paints off the canvases. Unfortunately inspiration from his uncle was cruelly cut short as he died during World War I.

When he was 19 years of age (1927), Cartier-Bresson took his passion for painting a step further and enrolled in a private art school as well as the Lhote Academy. The latter was a Parisian studio owned and run by André Lhote, a Cubist painter and sculptor. Cartier-Bresson also went on to study painting under the watchful eyes of Jacques Émile Blanche while like most everyone else during that time indulged in reading the works of Dostoevsky, Schopenhauer, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Freud, Proust, Joyce including Marx and Engels.

However it was Lhote who provided the fuel for his growth, taking his students – including Cartier-Bresson – to the Louvre and other galleries in and around Paris to study contemporary art. Combine that with his intuitive passion for modern and impressionistic art forms, it was no surprise that Cartier-Bresson would eventually veer. Without a doubt, Lhote’s influence was instrumental – someone that Cartier-Bresson would ultimately attribute to as his teacher of photography albeit without a camera.

Cartier-Bresson learned tremendously from Lhote’s discipline and rhetoric about theories. Although he was keen to break out into his own yearning to express, it was Lhote who gave him the fundamentals that were necessary for him to resolve problems; first in painting and then later on in photography. It was also at this time that right across Europe, photographic realism was beginning to mushroom but opinions were divided. There was not much common ground as different schools were marching to different tunes but all the same, they were united in wanting to liberalise the medium. Almost coincidentally 1924 also saw the arrival of the surrealism movement that expedited Cartier-Bresson’s learning curve where he was essentially captivated with the concept of blending the subconscious with the present.

Cartier-Bresson’s understanding of painting did not equip him well despite the dramatic changes in the cultural and political climate that was storming Europe then. While he was eager to liberate himself, he was also caught up in his own inabilities to find a way to do so and in his frustration he destroyed much of his own paintings at that time.

Prior to the turn of the decade, Cartier-Bresson studied English art and literature at the University of Cambridge in England. It was then that he began to master his second language. In 1931 after completing his national service with the French Army, Cartier-Bresson parted ways with Lhote, citing a refusal to allow rigidity to overcome his sense of freedom and expression, and decided to head to Côte d’Ivoire on the French coast of Africa with a Box Brownie he received as a gift from his parents. It was there that his desire to paint became alive once more. With no ready income available, Cartier-Bresson would go game hunting and sell to local villagers. His experiences with hunting would eventually come in handy in his eventual style of photography but naturally it wasn’t something he actually pre-empted.

The photographic development

As a young kid, Cartier-Bresson was introduced to photography with a Box Brownie, given to him by his parents, which he used primarily for holiday snapshots. He would eventually experiment with a 3x4 inch view camera but it was in 1931 when recuperating in Marseille on his return from the African coast that the catalyst came in the form of a photograph taken by Hungarian photojournalist Martin Munkacsi that drew him in. Called ‘Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika,’ it showed three young African boys in the buff heading to the lake backlit. To Cartier-Bresson, it was that moment of capture that spoke volumes of the element of joy in their freedom, grace and spontaneousness.

In relation to that photograph, Cartier-Bresson recalled, “The only thing that was a complete amazement to me... (that) brought me to photography was the work of Munkacsi. When I saw the photograph…of the black kids running in a wave, I couldn’t believe such a thing could be caught with a camera. I said, ‘Damn it,’ and took my camera and went out into the street.”

It was Munkacsi’s photograph that finally turned Cartier-Bresson from painting to photography. While in Marseille, he purchased a Leica 35mm rangefinder camera with a 50mm standard lens that would be his staple for many years. Cartier-Bresson considered his Leica as an ‘extension of his eye’ and added, “I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant.”

He would soon appreciate the unobtrusiveness of a small camera and what that ultimately meant to him in a crowded public or when capturing spontaneity when natural poise was always going to pose a greater and more genuine sense of value to his imagination. And it was this natural gait that truly impressed him about the smallness of his Leica for it helped him explore the wider realm of what eventually became street photography. The ability to immerse himself into the frenzy of movement and transformation that liberated his senses far more than painting could do for him.

Like a spring that has been ratcheted up for years, Cartier-Bresson found the release he had been looking for and with that, he travelled through Europe – Berlin, Brussels, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and Madrid – and walked the street life, readily equipped to capture the moments he desired. As early as 1932, Cartier-Bresson held his first exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York followed by a stint at the Ateneo Club in Madrid. Two years later (1934), he jointly exhibited with Manuel Alvarez Bravo in Mexico.

In the same year, Cartier-Bresson was introduced to a young Polish photographer by the name of David Szymin (later changed to David Seymour) and found that both of them had much in common. Soon they became close friends. And through Seymour, Cartier-Bresson met a Hungarian photographer called Endré Friedmann who eventually changed his name to Robert Capa. It didn’t take long for the three of them to eventually share a studio together. It was Capa who was instrumental in convincing Cartier-Bresson to dissociate himself from being called a ‘surrealist photographer.’

He said, “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.”

An insight into Cartier-Bresson’s equipment and techniques

Cartier-Bresson’s equipment comprised 35mm Leica rangefinder cameras with the standard Leitz Summicron 50mm lens. It’s not certain how many he used in his lifetime or if he had other focal length lenses but it is thought that he did use some shorter focal length wide-angle lenses for the occasional landscape photography. It is said that he had a 90mm short telephoto but he carried nothing else – no tripod, no flash, reflectors or other aids.

In fact Cartier-Bresson’s disdain for the flash is well known as he saw it as “impolite…like coming to a concert with a pistol in your hand.” In fact he had this to say in the preface to his 1952 publication, “The Decisive Moment”:

“…and no photographs taken with the aid of flashlight either, if only out of respect for the actual light… Unless a photographer observes such conditions as these, he may become an intolerably aggressive character.”

Cartier-Bresson’s unobtrusive style of photography made all the more apparent with his adoption of the Leica gave him the much-needed route to capturing life in its most natural state and allowed him a passage to approach his subjects with respect and dignity. It was this approach that allowed Cartier-Bresson to capture photographs of the assassinated Mohandas Gandhi lying in state in 1948. In stark contrast LIFE photographer Margaret Bourke-White had her film confiscated by Gandhi’s devotees who considered her actions disrespectful. She was using a large camera and flash.

Essentially his time in photography up till the end of World War II was based on the use of his first and only Leica, which he had buried and then unearthed following his escape from the Nazi POW camp.

Because of the Leica’s chrome body, Cartier-Bresson’s characteristic habit was to cover those parts with black tape in order to ensure that he and his camera were less visible. The inconspicuous nature of a camera that does not attract attention (and does not pose reflection) was the essential part of his ‘de rigueur.’

Cartier-Bresson never carried his Leica with the camera case. His lens was always open, always ready to use although when he did use a lens cap, it was tied to a string. His imitable photographic style was to hold the camera in his hand or nestled in a crook of his arm, always ready to respond in that instant of an action.

Unlike the so-called conventional wisdom, Cartier-Bresson dismissed the idea of strapping the camera around the neck or slung around the shoulder. For him they were too inconspicuous and too inaccessible. Beaumont Newhall wrote in a 1964 publication called, ‘A Velvet Hand, a Hawk’s Eye: Cartier-Bresson at Work’:

“Once, lunching with friends at a restaurant, he suddenly pushed back his chair, put his camera to his eye, snapped the shutter and sat down – without even interrupting the table conversation. He had seen, while talking, a famous painter. Days later, we saw the photograph he had taken. It seemed, in its direct simplicity and in its penetration, the product of a formal portrait sitting.”

Although technologies in film and camera designs were relatively primitive during those years, the Leica proved fast enough in handling and the black-and-white films he relied on were good enough for his application. More importantly Leica’s reputation for high-resolution lenses had made it possible for Cartier-Bresson to operate the way he did – stealthily. Combining mobility, functionality and performance, Cartier-Bresson and his Leica were a powerful proposition for street photojournalism.

For Cartier-Bresson, the 35mm format helped free him from the cumbersome 4x5 press camera or the awkward 6x6cm TLRs, cameras that anchored him down with unwieldiness. Cartier-Bresson referred to the smaller film format as, “the velvet hand (and) the hawk’s eye.”

As it is with the principle of integrity at Magnum Photos, Cartier-Bresson never cropped his photographs after they were taken. In other words, he composed his photographs in-camera rather than exploit the manoeuvrability that darkrooms could offer. In fact every single one of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs were printed in full frame with neither cropping nor darkroom manipulation (something we now call post-editing).

Cartier-Bresson will always be associated with black-and-white imagery. His dabbling in colour was short-lived as he expressed disappointment with the few attempts he made. While he did process his own films during the early days of his first marriage, he subsequently did not make his own prints; something he quipped, “…never been interested… never, never.”

“Right from the beginning. For me, photography with a small camera like the Leica is an instant drawing.”

Interestingly although others see his photography as ‘art,’ Cartier-Bresson’s dismissal of such claims and adulations as rather a gut reaction to a brief but decisive moment in time.

As for automatic cameras, he had this to say, “it’s like shooting partridges with a machine gun.”

The embryonic years

By now Cartier-Bresson had already exhibited in New York, shared gallery space with not just Manuel Alvarez Bravo but also Walker Evans. Harper’s Bazaar’s Carmel Snow offered him a fashion assignment but without any working knowledge of models, he didn’t do too well. While on assignment, Cartier-Bresson encountered fellow photographer Paul Strand famed for his documentary, ‘The Plough that Broke the Plains,’ a documentary about the Depression era.

On his return to France, Cartier-Bresson contacted French film director Jean Renoir for a possible job, landing minor acting roles in the 1936 film ‘Une Partie De Campagne’ (A Day in the Country) and three years later, ‘La Règle Du Jeu’ (The Rules of the Game). Cartier-Bresson’s acting experiences turned out to be invaluable as he managed to understand the subtle nuances of being on the other side of the camera.

1937 marked the year when French weekly ‘Regards’ used Cartier-Bresson’s photos to cover the coronation of King George V. As first publication of his photojournalistic skills, his work had no coverage of the King himself but instead he emphasised the adoring subjects that lined the streets of London. Interestingly also, his reluctance to use his full family name resulted in credits given to the name ‘Cartier.’

The evidence of Cartier-Bresson’s imitable likeness to someone with a completely different set of eyes is no better expressed in this assignment. While the dramatic prop of any focal point was obviously the King himself, Cartier-Bresson’s shift was deliberate but it wasn’t just about story telling. He meant a different verve when he focused on the crowd and not the procession and by ignoring the seemingly obvious he created a stronger centring of his mind’s eye. Perhaps Cartier-Bresson put it best in this regard:

“Photography… is at one and the same time, the recognition of a fact in a fraction of a second and the rigorous arrangement of the forms visually perceived, which give the fact impression and significance.”

In the same year (1937) Cartier-Bresson married a Javanese dancer by the name of Ratna Mohini and lived together in a servant’s quarters on the fourth floor at 19 rue Danielle Casanova, which was essentially a large studio with a small bedroom, kitchen and a bathroom that he partly converted into a makeshift darkroom to develop his films.

Cartier-Bresson recalled the time when a friend of his, Max Jacob, took him to meet a fortune teller who told him that he would marry someone who would not be from India or from China, but would also not be white. Cartier-Bresson continued, “This fortune teller also told me that the marriage would be difficult and that when I was old, I would marry someone much younger than I and would be very happy.” His marriage to Mohini would last thirty years before they divorced. Three years later, Cartier-Bresson married Martine Franck who was thirty years younger and Mélanie his daughter was born.

For the next two years Cartier-Bresson was employed as a photographer for the French Communist evening paper called ‘Ce Soir,’ a reflection of his leftist sentiments, which he shared with his friends, Seymour and Capa.

By then World War II had broken out and Cartier-Bresson enlisted in the French Army as a Corporal in the Film and Photo unit. In 1940 during the Battle of France, he was captured by the Germans at St Dié in the Vosges Mountains where he laboured for 35 months in a POW camp. After two attempts to escape for which he was caught and punished by solitary confinement, he was eventually victorious, hiding safely in a farm in Touraine before he could secure falsified papers that gave him safe passage to travel within France where he then began working underground. Cartier-Bresson worked incognito with other photographers to cover the Occupation followed by the Liberation of France.

By 1943, Cartier-Bresson was once again a free man and he returned to the Vosges Mountains to recover his Leica camera, which he buried earlier in some farmland. He was then asked by the American Office of War Information to document the armistice and the return of the French prisoners and displaced persons. He called it, ‘Le Retour.’ Interestingly rumours were also doing their rounds in America that Cartier-Bresson was killed at war. His documentary, which was released four years later (1947) was shown at the New York Museum of Modern Art together with the publication of his very first book called, ‘The Photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson.’

Magnum Photos

In the spring of 1947, Cartier-Bresson teamed up with his old friends, David Seymour and Robert Capa together with William Vandivert and George Rodger to form Magnum Photos, a cooperative photo agency that was the brainchild of Capa. Together as a team, members of the agency would divide up the photo assignments.

Having quit LIFE Magazine in London by then, Rodger covered the African continent including the Middle East. Seymour took over assignments in Europe because of his ability to speak many of the continental languages. Like Rodger, Vandivert has also left LIFE and now worked in America. Capa just about went anywhere where there were assignments others weren’t covering. As for Cartier-Bresson, he went to India and China. Two women were also instrumental in the initial foundations of Magnum Photos. Maria Eisner managed the Paris office while Vandivert’s wife, Rita, not only handled the American operations in New York but was also its first president.

Magnum Photos’s mission underpinned the spontaneity of the brand of photography that Cartier-Bresson shared with his fellow founders and some of their inaugural assignments bore names that evoke this sense of touching lives wherever they went to capture such as ‘People Live Everywhere,’ ‘Youth of the World,’ ‘Women of the World’ and ‘The Child Generation.’ As a result Magnum Photos became the hallmark of photography servicing humanity by way of images.

The emergence

It wasn’t until 1948 that Cartier-Bresson hit pay dirt with his coverage of Gandhi’s funeral in India followed by the ending stages of the Chinese Civil War a year on. In China, his images captured not only the final six months of the outgoing Kuomintang administration followed by the emergence of Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic movement but also the remaining eunuchs of Imperial China in Beijing in the last days of the country’s dynastial reign. Cartier-Bresson set forth then for Indonesia – then known as Dutch East Indies – to cover Soekarno’s rise to power in the independence movement from the Dutch.

In fact Cartier-Bresson went farther, covering countries like Mexico, Canada, the United States, Japan and Soviet Union amongst countless others. In post-war Soviet Union, he was the first and only Western photographer who had carte blanche coverage to photograph ‘freely.’

It was in 1952 that the world came to know of one of Cartier-Bresson’s most famous terminology, namely ‘The Decisive Moment’ when he published his next book called ‘Images à la sauvette’ (vaguely meaning ‘images on the run’ or ‘stolen images’), comprising 126 of his photographs captured from his tour of India, China and other countries. In the preface for the book, Cartier-Bresson took excerpts from the 17th century Cardinal de Retz that read in translated English as, “There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.”

What is essential here is that Cartier-Bresson used ‘the decisive moment’ as a principle or guiding light that defined his photographic art form. This was best expressed by what he had to say:

“To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organisation of forms that give that event its proper expression.”

He went on to say, “Photography is not like painting…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.”

“Once you miss it, it is gone forever.”

That decisive moment is best shown in Cartier-Bresson’s signature photograph taken in 1932 behind the Gare Saint-Lazare train station in Paris, capturing a man leaping across a large puddle of water almost at the point but not quite crashing into the pool. Stilled by his camera shutter for just that millisecond and frozen eternally in time, Cartier-Bresson’s interpretation of the decisive moment was more than merely stopping action.

His strong background in traditional French painting and being drawn to the emergence of the ‘golden proportion’ at that time, remnants of his first mentor, Andre Lhote’s rhetoric was evident when he claimed that geometric composition was also vital. In the preface to his seminal 1952 book, ‘The Decisive Moment,’ he defined his style of photography as:

“…the simultaneous recognition in a fraction of a second of the significance of an event as well as a precise organisation of forms.”

Cartier-Bresson just knew where he needed to be at the right time and at the right moment. It was either that his camera found him or he found his camera at life’s most intuitive and significant turns. Cartier-Bresson’s wife, photographer Martine Franck said, “I think Henri had an innate intuition of what was going on in the world and what was important. I mean, you were in India when Gandhi was assassinated. You were in China when the communists arrived… You were in Russia at the right time.”

Despite this, Cartier-Bresson himself said, “People often say that I have been in the right place at the right time. What they really mean is that I follow the newspapers in order to get a sense of what is happening in the world.” Cartier-Bresson’s uncanny ability as a photojournalist is epitomised in the countless images that capture the world in transition. In his 1955 book called, ‘The Europeans,’ he defined the role by saying, “I was there and this is how life appeared to me at that moment.”

If you take these two statements and grind them together with all his images that are archived at Magnum Photos, there you will have the penultimate essence of what photojournalism is – the anticipation of a significant event where Cartier-Bresson managed to find himself in position to capture with captivation and thoroughness, edited into film and with text and captions added and then witnessed throughout magazines and pictorials a world he witnessed and communicated to a mass audience.

And all this while, Cartier-Bresson’s works have been seen elsewhere but his home country. It took until 1955 for his first exhibition in France to bear fruit at the Pavillon de Marsan in the Louvre.

For more than thirty years Cartier-Bresson worked on assignment for LIFE Magazine including other journals, courting far-flung places throughout the world to achieve the images that would eventually bring him fame. His images document some of the greatest events of the previous century including the Spanish Civil War, the 1945 liberation of Paris as well as the 1968 student rebellion, the assassination of Gandhi, the Berlin Wall and the deserts of Egypt. He also completed portraits of Sartre, Picasso, Colette, Matisse (who painted one of the book covers for Cartier-Bresson), Pound and Giacometti.

The twilight years

The Sixties was a significant period in Cartier-Bresson’s life. In 1966 he withdrew from his position as a principal of Magnum Photos although his photographs continued to be distributed. A year later (1967) he divorced his wife Ratna and three years later, married Martine Franck, a Belgian photographer in her own right who was thirty years younger. In 1968 thirteen years after his first French exhibit (1968), Cartier-Bresson began winding down his photography, concentrating instead on his drawing and painting. In 1972 he and Martine adopted a little girl named Mélanie as their daughter.

Martine Franck herself was a very accomplished photographer in her own right. As early as 1963 she worked as a photographer for TIME-LIFE in Paris. Three yeas later she met Cartier-Bresson while covering the Parisian fashion shows for the New York Times. After her marriage to Cartier-Bresson, she worked at the Vu photo agency in Paris until 1971 and thereafter co-founded the Viva agency in 1972.

Apart from her work in promoting Cartier-Bresson’s legacy, Franck had also become a full member of Magnum Photos in 1983 and was an accomplished contributor to the Vogue magazine. She has also been the official photographer for the Théâtre du Soleil since 1964. Her major projects of note included the documentation of the ancient Gaelic community in Ireland, the education system of the Tibetan Tulkus monks as well as a series of children’s fashion in 2006 for the Japan Vogue magazine.

By the early Seventies Cartier-Bresson was considered retired and other than the odd private portrait, he no longer indulged in photography although he never quite rid himself of his Leica. Kept in a safe in his house, he rarely took it out anymore. Putting a 45-year photographic career behind him, Cartier-Bresson once said, “I never think about photography…it doesn’t interest me.” (Susan Stamberg, NPR, Jul 3 2003)

Surprisingly he never thought of himself as imaginative and that certainly comes across as a surprise given his magnitude as a great photographer of impeccable enigma. As Cartier-Bresson applied himself to his drawings and paintings, it was clear that what he possessed in his photography was largely absent in his canvas. Subjects for his paintings were essentially those of French life such as buildings, landscapes, museum artefacts, portraits of friends and models including one of his second wife, Martine. While competent, they lack the spontaneity that he was famous for although his use of colour was distinct only because he lacked this medium in his photography.

In 1975 the Carlton Gallery in New York held Cartier-Bresson’s first exhibition of his drawings.

In the twilight of his years, Cartier-Bresson would be at his studio near the Place des Victoires or in the Louvre or at his apartment overlooking the Tuileries where he enjoyed the panoramic views that captivated the imagination of Monet and Pissarro more than a century ago. In any of these places, he would be seen drawing or painting.

Just prior to turning 95, Cartier-Bresson together with his wife Martine and daughter established the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation (http://www.henricartierbresson.org), coinciding with a retrospective of his work held at the French National Library. It was also the country’s first private foundation that was dedicated to photography. Having almost removed himself from photography, Cartier-Bresson would insist that he no longer wanted to talk about the art form.

“It’s like when you’re divorced and people keep asking you about your former wife,” he said, “…there’s something indecent about it.” Nonetheless he couldn’t actually keep himself away from it.

The French Government recognised the Foundation for its value and interest to the public, housing it in an elegant refurbished atelier in Montparnasse. As it is written in their website, the aims of the Foundation are:

• To preserve the independence and keep alive the spirit of HCB’s work

• To maintain this exceptional heritage in France, which will be inalienable and open to visitors

• To show – through exhibitions – the ‘highlights’ of the collection and the work of other photographers, painters, sculptors. This is the originality of the Foundation.

• To allow scholars access to carefully organised archives for research purposes

• To encourage creativity through a biennial grant programme that provides financial support for a photography project selected by an international jury

• To stimulate exchange and debate through an ongoing conference and lecture programme

Perhaps the setting up of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation best echoes the importance that Cartier-Bresson himself placed the element of humanism, his longstanding ethic in his work as a photojournalist. In essence his subjects were predominantly people. He sees them with an eye for warmth, amusement, empathy, connectedness, curiosity and sensitivity.

Cartier-Bresson spoke of photography as an art form that required emotions and not just the technical dexterity of the head and hand. In other words the heart was an important part of what his eyes saw. His brand of humanism coveted both a respect for his subjects as much as it must serve an audience. In his book ‘The Decisive Moment’ Cartier-Bresson wrote of, “a world weighted down with preoccupations,” with people “needing the companionship of images.”

“What is most satisfying for a photographer is not recognition, success and so forth. It is communication – what you say can mean something to other people, can be of a certain importance.”

In summing up his artistic outlook, Cartier-Bresson once said during a BBC interview citing English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626), “The contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion without substitution or imposture is, in its self, a noble thing than a whole harvest of inventions.” He added, “That is a respect of reality.”

Shortly thereafter Cartier-Bresson was at the Pompidou Centre sketching a Matisse portrait busy and focused and paying no attention to the people who were milling around snapping pictures of him. He was absorbed in his world while others were amused by the simple sight of an old man so engrossed in his sketching. When he finally called it a day and got up to leave, Cartier-Bresson caught sight of a couple seated aside each other on a bench with a child resting on the man’s shoulders.

“A perfect composition if you cut out the woman,” he said before making a short chopping gesture towards her. Taken aback by the suddenness of an old man’s movements, the woman was startled.

“Why didn’t I bring my camera?” Cartier-Bresson asked himself. Then he clicked an imaginary shutter and left.

The legacy

Cartier-Bresson passed away at the age of 95 in 2004 in Céreste in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence* in France. The cause of death was never made public. He was buried in Cimetière de Montjustin in the same province. His wife Martine Franck and daughter Mélanie continue to promote his works today through the HCB Foundation.

* Some other media reports had claimed that he died in l’Ile-sur-Sorgue in the rural Vaucluse region in south-eastern France

In the 1985 publication called, ‘Henri Cartier-Bresson in India,’ Satyajit Ray, famed for his Apu Trilogy, wrote in its preface words that described the man who has done for photography no others at any time has matched let alone changed:

“(His work was)…unique in its fusion of head and heart, in its wit and its poetry… The deep regard for people that is revealed in these Indian photographs as well as in his photographs of any people anywhere in the world, invests them with a palpable humanism. Add to this the unique skill and vision that raise the ordinary and the ephemeral to a monumental level and you have the hallmark of the greatest photographer of our time.”

Philip Brookman* in his article called, ‘Conversations in Silence,’ perhaps put it very aptly:

“…Cartier-Bresson’s pictures have influenced generations of followers. His photographs have entered our collective memory, lodged there like signposts in the visual narrative of this century. His portraits, of famous and anonymous lives, bring personalities to life by merging their often-complex psychologies with an economy of formal elegance. He is equally at home as an artist and as a journalist.”

* Philip Brookman is a curator of photography and media arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The famous “Tête à Tête: Portraits by Henri Cartier-Bresson was held at the National Portrait Gallery from October 29 1999 to January 9 2000 at which time his article, ‘Conversations in Silence’ was written.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Born August 22 1908, Chanteloup, Seine-et-Marne, France

Died August 3 2004, Céreste in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France

Main Residence Paris, France

Key Images Rue Mouffetard, Paris, 1954 (Boy with Bottles)

Behind the Gare St Lazare, 1932

Siphnos, Greece, 1961

Srinigar, Kashmir, India, 1948

On the Banks of the Marne, France, 1938

Key interest points All of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs were composed at the time of exposure. All his photographs with the exception of Behind the Gare St Lazare, 1932 included black borders of the negatives indicating that no cropping was done in the darkroom.

Henri Cartier-Bresson prefers to call photography ‘instant drawing.’ He drew and painted early in his life and had returned to it until his death.

The ‘boy with the bottles’ in Rue Mouffetard, Paris, 1954 recently celebrated his fiftieth birthday and Cartier-Bresson was there to join in the festivities.

Image Format Black-and-white silver gelatin

11x14 and 16x20 inch (30x40 and 40x50 cm)

Total Images Of the popular photographs, there are anywhere from 100 to 700 in existence

Perceived Image Value Cartier-Bresson’s images have been sold for US$12,500 to US$25,000 for each 11x14” and between US$15,000 and US$25,000 for 16x20” prints

Image Vintage and Authenticity Vintage prints of Cartier-Bresson’s work are quite rare but occasionally available and mostly show a ‘Magnum Photos’ stamp for 10x8 inch images that were from the late Forties to early Fifties. Vintage means that the print date is at or near the same time as the date of the negative.

Portfolios No known portfolios were known that Cartier-Bresson had ever produced

Publications Still in Print Henri Cartier-Bresson: Photographer

Europeans (reprint)

A Propos de Paris

Publications Now Out of Print The Decisive Moment

Mexican Notebooks

In India

Henri Cartier-Bresson (PhotoPoche)

Henry Cartier-Bresson and the Artless Art

America in Passing

Photographic Equipment Leica 35mm camera. No exact information is available although it is reasonable to assume that it was a Leica III with a Summicron 50mm standard lens. It is infrequently recorded that Cartier-Bresson had also used a 90mm telephoto as well as one or more wide-angle lenses. He used neither a tripod nor flash.

QUOTES:

“We are passive onlookers in a world that moves perpetually. Our only moment of creation is that 1/125th of a second when the shutter clicks, the signal is given and motion is stopped…”

“The simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organisation of forms, which gives that event its proper expression… In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotif.”

“…when I saw the photograph…of the black kids running in a wave, I couldn’t believe such a thing could be caught with a camera. I said, ‘Damn it,’ and took my camera and went out into the street.”

“I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant.”

“…and no photographs taken with the aid of flashlight either, if only out of respect for the actual light… Unless a photographer observes such conditions as these, he may become an intolerably aggressive character.”

“Right from the beginning. For me, photography with a small camera like the Leica is an instant drawing.”

“Photography… is at one and the same time, the recognition of a fact in a fraction of a second and the rigorous arrangement of the forms visually perceived, which give the fact impression and significance.”

“Photography is not like painting…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.”

“Once you miss it, it is gone forever.”

“People often say that I have been in the right place at the right time. What they really mean is that I follow the newspapers in order to get a sense of what is happening in the world.”

“I was there and this is how life appeared to me at that moment.”

“I never think about photography…it doesn’t interest me.”

“What is most satisfying for a photographer is not recognition, success and so forth. It is communication – what you say can mean something to other people, can be of a certain importance.”

“The contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion without substitution or imposture is, in its self, a noble thing than a whole harvest of inventions. That is a respect of reality.”

“Why didn’t I bring my camera?”

... eto!!!