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Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1908-2004
Art in America, Oct, 2004 by David Ebony
Henri Cartier-Bresson, influential photographer and co-founder of Magnum Photos, died at his home in southern France on Aug. 3, shortly before his 96th birthday on Aug. 22. With a background in painting and drawing, Cartier-Bresson became internationally renowned, beginning in the mid-1930s, for photographs that critics have described as a unique merger of photojournalism and fine-art photography. One of the first proponents of the lightweight 35mm Leica camera, which he used throughout his career, Cartier-Bresson was early on regarded as a master of "the decisive moment," a technique that aimed to capture in a photo the precise instant defining an action, scene or historical event. Some of his early efforts were included in his first book, The Decisive Moment, which attracted considerable attention when it appeared in 1952.
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Born in Chanteleup, near Paris, in 1908, the son of a wealthy industrialist, Cartier-Bresson studied art with the modernist painter Andre Lhote. In the late 1920s, he met Andre Breton and became associated with the Surrealist circle, although he was never a full-fledged member of the group. He began taking photos in 1931, when he started traveling extensively throughout Europe, camera always in hand. French novelist and critic Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues once said that Cartier-Bresson used his Leica "rather as the Surrealists tried to use automatic writing: as a window that leaves one permanently open for visitations of the unconscious and the unpredictable." His first solo exhibition was held in Madrid in 1933, followed by shows in Mexico City (with Manuel Alvarez Bravo) and New York, at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1935.
After meeting Paul Strand, who taught him about cinema, Cartier-Bresson took an interest in filmmaking. Upon returning to France in 1936, he worked for several years as an assistant to the director Jean Renoir. In 1940, he was imprisoned by the Nazis; after two unsuccessful attempts, he managed to escape. His photos of the Liberation of Paris are among the most famous of the period, and in 1945 he directed Le Retour, a classic documentary on returning prisoners of war and deportees.
A Cartier-Bresson retrospective was held in 1947 at New York's Museum of Modern Art. During an extended stay in the U.S. the following year, he co-founded, along with Robert Capa and others, Magnum Photos, an agency that still thrives today. Cartier-Bresson helped direct Magnum in various capacities for nearly two decades, finally resigning in 1966.
Among Cartier-Bresson's best-known photos are those he took in 1948 of Mahatma Gandhi and the events surrounding his assassination and funeral, which were published in Life. The photographer had spent the afternoon with Gandhi on Jan. 30, and left him barely 15 minutes before he was fatally shot. Cartier-Bresson photographed in China during the 1949 Communist takeover, and in the following decades traveled extensively in that country, the USSR and Cuba.
After holding numerous exhibitions and publishing a highly successful series of photo books, he put his camera aside in 1974 and devoted himself to painting, drawing and Buddhist studies. Among his books are People of Moscow (1955), China in Transition (1956), The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson (1968), The Face of Asia (1972), About Russia (1974), A Propos de Paris (1984) and Henri Cartier-Bresson in India (1985). Last year, the Cartier-Bresson Foundation opened in the Montmartre quarter of Paris. While housing and maintaining the photographer's archives, the fledgling institution also plans an annual series of public exhibitions.
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