A story of life | Henri Cartier-Bresson

[Nada Jung]

Henri Cartier-Bresson is considered by many to be a street photographer, but in fact he considered himself a photo artist. Who knows, maybe because of this there is now a lot of controversy about his personality …

Born in Chanteloup-en-Brie, France in 1908 to a wealthy textile merchant, Henri Cartier-Bresson was the eldest of five children. His mother, Marthe, exposed him to the arts including taking him on trips to the Louvre in Paris, attending chamber music concerts, and regularly reading him poetry. His father, Andre, was a severe man, consumed with the role of paternal duty and dedicated to his successful textile business. In response to his father's defection to the world of business, Henri vowed at an early age never to follow in his father's footsteps.

Painting captured the interest of Cartier-Bresson when he was just five years old. His uncle, Louis, was an accomplished painter and winner of the Prix de Rome in 1910. The two spent many hours in Louis's studio together and Henri began referring to his uncle as his "mythical father." Cartier-Bresson's apprenticeship in his uncle's studio ended abruptly and tragically when Louis was killed in the Great War; the young Cartier-Bresson also lost his two brothers to that war.

Henri continued painting on his own and, between painting and reading, found a means of escape from the turmoil of the real world. Eventually, his parents hired two art tutors to instruct him while he attended Catholic school. Although photography was not yet of particular interest to Cartier-Bresson at that time, he watched several films, including seminal ones by D.W. Griffith and Erich von Stroheim, which would prove to be critical sources of inspiration when he began producing his own films following WWII.

Despite his father's aspirations for his son to attend the most prestigious French business school, Cartier-Bresson failed the baccalaureate entrance exam three times. Instead, in 1926 he left home to study at the private art academy of the French Cubist sculptor and painter, Andre Lhote, in Montparnasse. Lhote advocated combining the aesthetic of the Cubists with the technical conventions of French neoclassical painters like Poussin and David, which he thought would link modernism to tradition. Lhote and his students made frequent trips to the Louvre to study the works of Old Masters and the works of Renaissance notables like Jan van Eyck and Piero della Francesca impressed the budding young painter. Those experiences contrasted with the students' visits to galleries around Paris where they absorbed contemporary art. Combining the best of the old and the new, Lhote became for Cartier-Bresson a teacher of "photography without a camera". He also studied portrait painting for a short time with Jacques-Emile Blanche, the society portraitist.

Cartier-Bresson spent a year - from 1928 to 1929 - studying art and literature and also English at Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge in England. In 1930, he was forced to leave his studies when he was conscripted into the French army and station at Le Bourget just outside of Paris. Back in France, he was introduced to important contacts in French art circles, including Surrealist writer, Rene Crevel, by his former art tutor. The two hit it off and Crevel and Cartier-Bresson soon frequented the buzzing Parisian café scene and reveled in the exciting nightlife of the capital city with other Surrealists. Henri was attracted to Crevel's well-known nihilism, his air of rebellion, and his dedication to the philosophy outlined in the Surrealist manifesto. Surrealism's spontaneous expression and reliance on intuition enticed Cartier-Bresson to add such ideas to his own experiments. Through Crevel, Cartier-Bresson met Surrealism founder, André Breton, as well as Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray. During that period, Cartier-Bresson had also become intrigued with contemporary philosophy and literature and read avidly works by thinkers like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, Proust, Mallarme, Freud, Marx, and Engels.

In 1931, after fulfilling his military obligations, during which time he had read Joseph Conrad's novel, Heart of Darkness (1899), Cartier-Bresson traveled to the Cote d'Ivoire in French colonial Africa with the notion of escaping the strictures of city life and having an adventure. He survived by hunting, shooting game and then selling the meat to villagers. Having acquired a camera before leaving for Africa, Cartier-Bresson took photographs with his second-hand Krauss camera. His year-long adventure ended when Henri contracted blackwater fever, a parasitical disease that nearly killed him. His condition worsened to the extent that he sent a postcard to this family outlining his last wishes.

Cartier-Bresson returned to France in 1931, recuperating first in Marseille. By chance, he saw the photograph Three Boys at Lake Tanganiyka (c. 1929) by the Hungarian photographer, Martin Munkacsi, of three boys running naked into waves on an African beach. The image of their silhouetted bodies captured a moment in time so strikingly that Henri was inspired to pursue photography with a seriousness that had been absent in his previous dabbling with the medium. He recalled the experience, saying, "I suddenly understood that photography can fix eternity in a moment. It is the only photo that influenced me. There is such intensity in this image, such spontaneity, such joie de vivre, such 'miraculousness', that even today it still bowls me over."

A year later Cartier-Bresson bought his first Leica camera. The camera was new to the market and it helped facilitate the impromptu nature of his approach to photography with its small size and portability, allowing him to act quickly, to capture candid images of his subjects without being overly intrusive. From 1932 through 1933, he travelled across Europe and Africa with his camera in the company of friends and then wandered in Mexico for much of 1934. While a good number of the photographs he produced during that three-year period were commissioned for publications, Cartier-Bresson had also begun compiling a portfolio for exhibition.

Cartier-Bresson briefly set aside photography to become a film director. Just before WWII, he travelled to New York where he spent a year learning the principles of montage from the modernist photographer Paul Strand and had his first photography exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1935. He returned to Paris in 1936 determined to capture Europe's worsening political climate in moving images. After GW Pabst and Luis Bunuel turned down his offers of help, he joined Jean Renoir to work on a propaganda film for the communist party. The film, La vie est à nous (Life is Ours) (1936), attacked the leading families who controlled France. A subsequent Renoir film, La Regle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game) (1939), in which Cartier-Bresson played an English butler, now a classic, was a satirical comedy examining the relationships between aristocrats and their servants. Cartier-Bresson subsequently made three documentaries in support of Republican Spain. In 1937, he returned to photography when he joined the staff of the newly founded communist newspaper, Ce Soir, alongside Robert Capa and David "Chim" Seymour.

With the onset of WWII, Cartier-Bresson joined the French military as a photographer. That same year, he was taken prisoner and sent to a German labor camp. After spending a terrible three years in the camp, he escaped on his third attempt. He returned to the farm in Vosges where he had previously buried his Leica, dug up the camera, and then remained there until the end of the war. At the farm he met his first wife, Ratna Mohini; he also continued underground resistance activities with the National Movement of War Prisoners and Deportees (MNPGD) with the farm as his home base. Once the announcement came over the radio that the Allied forces had landed in Normandy, he traveled with Capa to Paris to cover the city's liberation from German occupation. Capa had taken some of the most emblematic photographs of the Allied invasion on D-Day on Omaha Beach and, perhaps, of World War II overall that are titled The Magnificent Eleven. In fact, the two men were responsible for providing some of the most memorable images of the death throes of the devastating war. Cartier-Bresson later created a film on the return of French prisoners of war entitled, Le Retour (1946). Between them, Cartier-Bresson and Capa defined wartime photojournalism.

In 1947, Cartier-Bresson co-founded Magnum Photos along with fellow photographers Capa, Seymour, and George Rodgers. The agency helped protect the interests of the photographers, the rightful owners of their negatives and all reproduction rights. The founding members of Magnum divided and travelled the world with Cartier-Bresson documenting Asia. No longer working under contracts for magazines, Cartier-Bresson had to seek out work on his own. His political involvement was firmly to the left and he was dedicated to journalistic photography, particularly in the interest of the communist press. His work while in Asia included documentation of the communist transition in China, the partition of Pakistan, and Mahatma Gandhi's death. By 1950, he had been awarded the US Camera Prize for best reportage of the year for his coverage of Gandhi and another award from the prestigious Overseas Press Club for his pictures taken in Nanking and Shanghai.

One of the most defining events of his career was the publication a book of his own work called The Decisive Moment, in 1952. The book's cover was designed by his friend, Henri Matisse, and the 126 photos it featured drew from his growing portfolio of images from across the world. He explained how he had arrived at the title by quoting 17th-century cleric and political agitator, Cardinal de Retz: "Il n'y a rien dans ce monde qui n'ait un moment decisif" ("There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment"). Far more than merely the title of his first major publication, the phrase became his aesthetic raison d'être. He explained, "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 organization of forms which give that event its proper expression."

The Decisive Moment book was the culmination of Cartier-Bresson's efforts with his friend E. Teriade. Teriade planned to publish multiple books with Cartier-Bresson and other important photographers - but the second world war only allowed him to publish one other book with Cartier-Bresson: The Europeans (1955).

By the time of his first exhibition in France in 1955, held at the Pavillion de Marsan in the prestigious Louvre Museum in Paris, Cartier-Bresson had acquired international acclaim, not the least for his candid portraits of notables such as William Faulkner, Truman Capote, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and many others. His second wife later recalled that his popularity as a portraitist and ability to get the most out of each situation was the key to his success. He never refused being introduced to anyone, he always had sensitivity to whoever he spoke with (whether a ruler or a pauper), and ultimately he was very connected to many important people; all these attributes allowed him access to photos that no other photographer could match. For the next 10 years he continued to travel the world, often in the context of war or its terrible aftermath, from Mexico, the U.S., China, Japan, India, and the Soviet Union. In addition, he had the unique distinction of being the first Western photographer to take photographs in the Cold War-era Soviet Union.

In 1966, Cartier-Bresson left Magnum and retired from photography. In 1970, he divorced his longtime wife to marry fellow photographer, Martine Frank. The couple had a daughter named Melanie. Henri no longer traveled the globe, but instead devoted himself to being a father.

In the 1970s, Cartier-Bresson retired from photography and even stopped taking photos altogether aside from producing a private portrait now and then. In fact, he stopped carrying around his camera, which had been like an extension of his body for much of his adult life; he kept the camera in a safe where it remained, little used, in the last years of his life.

He also began painting again, applying an aesthetic honed over a lifetime of producing primarily photographs. Towards the end of his life, Cartier-Bresson even developed a reluctance to even discuss photography, the medium that had been his life's work. Always one to shy away from being photographed himself, Henri also shunned interviews and wished to have no part in being a curator, archivist, or even a commentator on his own photography. In 2003, he created the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation with his wife and daughter. On August 3, 2004, he died in Cereste, France.