Henri-Cartier Bresson: A Biography

Apollo, Oct, 2005 by John Jolliffe

Pierre Assouline Thames & Hudson, 20 [pounds sterling] ISBN 0 500 151233 X

The first biography of Cartier-Bresson since his death is far from definitive, writes John Jolliffe, but it makes a good accompaniment to the memorable retrospective currently in Edinburgh.

Henri Cartier-Bresson can safely be regarded as the greatest photojournalist--and perhaps the greatest photographer--of his century. Born in 1908, he was determined to escape from a bourgeois-industrial background that was prosperous, but far from indulgent. At school, he failed his baccalaureat three times. He joined the Academie Lhote and never forgot the all-importance of composition that he learned there. Rimbaud and Baudelaire had already inspired his ideas, and Max Jacob, Jacques-Emile Blanche and Harry Crosby were later influences.

Eager to see the world, he took various jobs in the Ivory Coast. He contracted bilharzia, then usually fatal, and wrote to his family asking for his body to be flown home and buried in the Varenne valley. Back came the answer, 'Your grandfather thinks that will be too expensive. Better if you come home', which, mercifully, he did. The next years were spent in solitary rambles around Europe in search of special visions, moments of truth, sometimes of a surreal kind, 'to exalt the strangeness in the banal', as the author of this biography puts it.

In 1933 he joined a geographical expedition in Mexico that ended before it began, when his group was robbed and left destitute by its leader, and it became clear that the popular reforms of President Cardenas had no time for surrealist ethnography. Cartier-Bresson stayed on in Mexico for a year, vigilantly sitting in low cafes with his Leica, and trawling the streets for moments of truth. After a year, he moved to New York, to share an apartment with the composer Nicolas Nabokov, for more of the same.

After another year, he returned to Paris, where he yearned to make films. Turned down by Bunuel, he joined Jean Renoir, who had been commissioned to make films of communist propaganda. Next came the coronation of George VI, where, characteristically, he concentrated on street scenes and ignored the pageantry. (Nearly thirty years later, he employed the same technique at Churchill's funeral.) When the war came, he worked as an army photographer until captured by the Germans. He escaped at the third attempt, in June 1943, and after the war worked on a series of short art books, photographing Matisse, Braque, Bonnard, Picasso and Rouault. As his fame spread, he photographed Edith Piaf, Christian Dior, Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, Sartre, Camus and Colette.

After a triumphant retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1947, he made a 12,000-mile tour up and down the USA with the poet John Malcolm Brinnin, Leica always at the ready. They planned a joint book, but it was eventually turned down by the publishers and it was not until 1991 that Cartier-Bresson eventually published the photographic half of the venture.

Globe-trotting had become a way of life. He photographed Gandhi hours before his assassination, and had a long interview with Jinnah, the first head of state in Pakistan. He covered the fall of Chiang-Kai-Shek in China, and the beginning of the Mao regime. He was interested in cultural rather than political life, but, like most French intellectuals, however hostile he had been to dictators before the war, he appears to have been unmoved by the even greater horrors of post-war communism.

Assouline traces the outlines of the rest of Cartier-Bresson's career, from the formation of the Magnum agency to his decision in 1970 to give up photo-journalism and return to his first love, drawing and painting. 'Photography', he had come to believe, 'is instant action. Drawing is meditation.' He hated talking about photography, and as a rule abhorred theorising. He believed that the photographer must remain as far as possible invisible, and photographs, to be any good, must speak for themselves. The great thing was the relationship between forms. A photographer must rely on instinct, inspired by an artistic culture.

Since Cartier-Bresson died only a year ago, this biography was written in his lifetime. It contains a certain amount of typical French pseudo-psychological and would-be philosophical attitudinising, but also interesting comments by his fellow Magnum photographers. It also brings out Cartier-Bresson's restlessness, tactlessness and general unpredictability; also his enthusiasm, and his belief in chance. Ultra-serious although he was as an artist, with no appetite for lighthearted company, he nevertheless relished the absurdities that came his way, as when he was, more than once, taken for the owner of Cartier, the jewellers, or when he was told, on arriving at his retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, 'Sorry, Sir, but cameras are not allowed inside', and meekly left his trusty Leica in the cloakroom. On another occasion, coming out of an exhibition where the captions had been displayed far too low, he entered the subsequent lunch on all fours.