Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson was born August 22, 1908, in Chanteloup-en-Brie, France, a rural village where the rivers Seine and Marne join. The current site of the Euro-Disney theme park. The eldest of five children, Henri Cartier-Bresson grew up in the prosperous Cartier-Bresson household situated on Paris's Rue de Lisbonne near the Europe Bridge. His father's family had been in the thread manufacturing business since 1789, and as a wealthy textile manufacturer. The Cartier-Bresson thread was a staple of French sewing kits. His mother's family originally from Normandy, were cotton merchants and landowners. This provided him with financial support to develop his interest in photography, allowing him more independence than many of his contemporaries. As the eldest son of the new generation, Henri was expected to direct his education and training preparation for one day taking over the family business.

Henri Cartier-Bresson was a disaffected bookworm and was far more interested in reading banned literature than mathematics. After an unsuccessful attempt to study music at the Ecole Fenelon, a Catholic school in Paris. Henri Cartier-Bresson then went on to the Lycee Condorcet. And it was here that he became interested in the intellectual currents which where at odds with the standard Catholic-cantered curriculum-psychoanalysis, Nietzschean philosophy (Friedrich Nietzsche German Swiss philosopher and writer. His analysis of the root motives and values that underlie traditional Western religion, morality and philosophy affected generations of theologians, philosophers, psychologists, poets, novelists, and playwrights). His uncle Louis, a gifted painter, introduced Henri to oil-painting, and it was the lure of the visual arts and the visits to his studio that had a lasting impression upon him. Painting became his main obsession, but this was cut short when his uncle Louis died in World War I. After finishing the Lycee, at the age of 19. Henri Cartier- Bresson went onto study privately with Andre Lhote at the Lhote academy. Andre Lhote was a Cubist painter (20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. It revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music and literature). Lhote's ambition was to unify the Cubists approach to reality with classical artistic forms, and to link the French classical tradition of Jacques-Louis David and Nicolas Poussin to Modernism. Lhote would take his pupils to the Louvre to study classical artists and to Parisian galleries to study contemporary art. Henri Cartier-Bresson regarded Lhote as a teacher of photography without a camera.

Between 1928 - 1929, Henri Cartier-Bresson studied English Art and literature at Cambridge University in England. In 1930, he had mandatory national service in the French army and was stationed at Le Bourget, near Paris. This was his first experience with a Brownie camera. In 1930 after reading Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness, Henri boarded a ship headed for the Cote d'Ivoire, within French colonial Africa. Surviving by shooting game and selling it to the local villagers. He fell into a coma after becoming ill with blackwater fever, and returned back to France. Henri recuperated in Marseille in 1931 and this deepened his relationship with the Surrealists (works featuring the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur humour). After an extensive trip through Eastern Europe he returned back to France in 1932 and bought a Leica camera with a 50mm lens in Marseilles. Henri Cartier-Bresson explained, "I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant." He described the Leica as an extension of his eye. The small camera gave him anonymity in a crowd or during intimate situations. This was an essential element in overcoming the formal and unnatural behaviour of those who were aware of being photographed. An unstaged glimpse into the human soul and nature. He photographed images that were revolutionary for their time, his images were of Europe's urban underclass and rural poor.

In 1935 Henri Cartier -Bresson traveled to the United States and was invited to exhibit his work at the New York's Julien Levy Gallery. It was here that he found a vast amount of images across the city's crowded and colourful boroughs to photograph. Whilst in New York Henri Cartier-Bresson met photographer Paul Strand who did the camera work for the Depression era documentaries i.e. The Plow that broke the plains. And after returning back to France, Henri served as second assistant director for a few films by the French director Jean Renoir. It was Renoir who made Henri act, so that he could understand the perspective of how it felt to be in front of the camera. He made his acting debut as a butler in 1939 La Regle du jeu. In 1937 he received a commission to make a documentary about a medical relief program providing aid to loyalist fighters wounded in the Spanish Civil War.

Henri Cartier-Bresson was in his late 20s when he married a Javanese dancer, Ratna Mohini in 1937. Between 1937 -1939 he worked as a photographer for Frances Communist daily evening paper, Ce Soir. At Ce Soir he became friends with two other photojournalists, Robert Capa and David Seymour, but he never joined the French Communist party. They would only submit their leftover work to an agency called Alliance Photo. Many of these images were published in the Vu, the French version of the American photo newsweekly, Life.

As a result of the outbreak of World War II, Henri Cartier-Bresson enlisted into the French army and was made a corporal in its film and photo unit. In June 1940 at St. Die in the Vosges Mountains, his unit was captured and transported to a prisoner-of-war camp in Wuerttemberg. Spending three years as a prisoner of war, doing forced labour under the Nazis. He made two unsuccessful attempts to escape. He finally succeeded on his third attempt. Hiding on a farm in Touraine, he managed to obtain false identity papers that would allow him to travel to France. Whilst back in France, he worked for an underground group that assisted other escaped POWS. He worked secretively with other photographers to cover and document the German occupation and then the liberation of France.

In 1945, at the war's end, Henri Cartier-Bresson resistance work had been noticed by the American military authorities. He was hired by the U.S. office of war information to make a documentary, Le Retour (The Return). A film about French citizens returning from prisoner-of-war camps.

His photography was an instant success and he started to travel all over the world on assignment for various magazines and for his own personal collection. He became interested in "Surrealism" and it was his friend Robert Capa who told him, "You will have an exhibition once in a while and your work will become precious and confidential. Keep on doing what you want, but use the name "photojournalism" which will put you in direct contact with what is going on in the world"

A human look - such was the creed of the Magnum Photos Association which he founded in 1947. Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, David Seymour and George Rodger founded Magnum photo, a cooperative agency of photojournalists owned and run by themselves. The new team would split assignments between themselves. Henri Cartier-Bresson would be assigned to India and China. George Rodger who had quit Life magazine in London after covering World war II, would cover Africa and the Middle East. David Seymour who spoke most European languages, would work in Europe. Robert Capa would work any where that had an assignment.

It was at Magnum that Henri Cartier-Bresson produced his famous essays. His photography conveyed and adapted a more general approach to express situations that are universally human.

When asked how he come upon the universally adopted term "the decisive moment", he replied: "I have nothing to do with it. I just found the following sentence in the memories of Cardinal de Retz: "Everything in the world has its decisive moment...." and when we were discussing the title for my book with my publisher, he suddenly said: "How about The Decisive moment, for instance" It was a fitting title and now I am a plagiarizer so to speak..... Naturally, the moment is a question of concentration. You must be concentrated, you must think, look, thats all..... The difference between a mediocre and a good picture amounts to a few millimetres..."

Henri Cartier-Bresson retired from photography in the early 1970's / 1972 and by 1975 no longer took pictures other than the occassional portrait. He became a recluse and lived in an apartment in Paris near the Louvre. Where he returned back to drawing and painting again.

Henri Cartier-Bresson died in Montjustin, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France, on August 2004, at the age 95. He was survived by his wife, Martine Franck and daughter Melanie.

"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 event its proper expression..... . In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human details can become a leitmotif." - Henri Cartier- Bresson.

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