(Originally published in 1952, this collection of Cartier-...)
Originally published in 1952, this collection of Cartier-Bresson's best work from his early years was embellished with a collage cover by Henri Matisse.
(This collection brings together photographs taken on two ...)
This collection brings together photographs taken on two separate visits Cartier-Bresson made to Mexico―the first in 1934, just as he was embarking on his photographic career, and the second some thirty years later.
(Presented for the first time in English, this volume brin...)
Presented for the first time in English, this volume brings together twelve notable interviews and conversations with Henri Cartier-Bresson carried out between 1951 and 1998. While many of us are acquainted with his images, there are so few texts available by Cartier-Bresson on his photographic process. These verbal, primary accounts capture the spirit of the master photographer and serve as a lasting document of his life and work, which has inspired generations of photographers and artists.
(Presents the renowned photographer's personal selection o...)
Presents the renowned photographer's personal selection of more than 130 of his best photographs of Paris taken over 50 years. This is a unique gallery of urban landscapes rendered by a great sensibility. 131 illustrations.
(With this publication Aperture presents an elegantly upda...)
With this publication Aperture presents an elegantly updated and refreshed edition of the classic Henri Cartier-Bresson volume in The Aperture Masters of Photography series. With an introduction by notable curator Clément Chéroux, this edition includes new, image-by-image commentary and a chronology of this influential and iconic artist's life. Initially presented as The History of Photography series in 1976, the first volume of The Masters of Photography series featured Cartier-Bresson and was edited by legendary French publisher Robert Delpire, who cofounded the series with Aperture's own Michael Hoffman. This redesigned and expanded version honors the selection of images from the original series, which Cartier-Bresson himself created with Delpire, encapsulating the spontaneity and intuition for which this legendary photographer is so celebrated.
The Mind's Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers
(The Mind's Eye features Cartier-Bresson's famous text on ...)
The Mind's Eye features Cartier-Bresson's famous text on "the decisive moment" as well as his observations on Moscow, Cuba and China during turbulent times. These essays ring with the same immediacy and visual intensity that characterize his photography.
(Includes thousands of prints and a vast resource of docum...)
Includes thousands of prints and a vast resource of documents relating to the photographer's life and work. The heart of the book surveys Cartier-Bresson's career through 300 photographs divided into 12 chapters.
Henri Cartier-Bresson was a photographer, who worked almost exclusively in black-and-white. He pioneered the genre of street photography.
Background
Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in 1908 in Chanteloup-en-Brie, Seine-et-Marne, France. Henri was the first of three children in the prosperous Cartier-Bresson household, a home situated on Paris's rue de Lisbonne. His father's family had been in the thread manufacturing business since 1789, but both Cartier-Bresson's great-grandfather and a contemporary uncle were talented artists; even his business-minded father liked to sketch.
Education
In 1927, Cartier-Bresson entered Lhote Academy, the studio of Cubist painter and sculptor André Lhote in Paris. He studied classical artists and contemporary art. He also studied painting with portraitist Jacques Émile Blanche.
From 1928 to 1929, Cartier-Bresson attended the University of Cambridge, where he studied English, art and literature, and became bilingual.
Henri Cartier-Bresson completed his mandatory service in the French Army, stationed at Le Bourget. In 1929, Cartier-Bresson's air squadron commandant placed him under house arrest for hunting without a license. American expatriate Harry Crosby persuaded the officer to release Cartier-Bresson into his custody. They spent time taking and printing pictures. He went to Côte d’Ivoire in French colonial Africa. He survived by shooting and selling the game. He took a portable camera. However, only seven photographs survived the tropics.
Henri returned to France in late 1931 and deepened his relationship with the Surrealists. The photographs taken by Hungarian photojournalist Martin Munkacsi inspired him to take up photography seriously. He acquired a Leica camera with 50 mm lens in Marseilles. To maintain anonymity to overcome the formal and unnatural behavior of his subjects, he painted its shiny parts with black paint. Henri photographed Berlin, Brussels, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and Madrid. His first photography exhibition was at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1932, and subsequently at the Ateneo Club in Madrid.
Henri met photographers David “Chim” Seymour and Robert Capa. They shared a studio, and Capa mentored Cartier-Bresson. In 1935, he traveled to the United States to exhibit his work at New York’s Julien Levy Gallery. He acted in Renoir’s “Partie de champagne” and “La Règle du jeu”. He helped Renoir make a film on the 200 families who ran France.
In 1937, he covered the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, for the French weekly Regards. He focused on the people lining the London streets alone. Between 1937 and 1939, he worked as a photographer for the French Communists’ evening paper, Ce Soir.
He joined the French Army during World War II as a Corporal in the Film and Photo unit. In 1940, he was captured by German soldiers and spent 35 months in Nazi prisoner-of-war camps. Henri tried twice to escape from the prison camp and was punished by solitary confinement. Successful at the third attempt, he hid on a farm in Touraine, and with false papers traveled to France. In France, he went underground, aided other escapees, and worked secretly with other photographers to cover the Occupation, and then the Liberation of France.
In 1943, he recovered his buried Leica camera. At the end of the war he was asked by the American Office of War Information to make a documentary, Le Retour (The Return) about returning French prisoners and displaced persons. His film on returning war refugees (released in the United States in 1947) spurred a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) instead of the posthumous show that MoMA had been preparing. The show debuted in 1947 together with the publication of his first book, The Photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Lincoln Kirstein and Beaumont Newhall wrote the book's text.
In early 1947, Cartier-Bresson, with Robert Capa, David Seymour, William Vandivert and George Rodger founded Magnum Photos. Cartier-Bresson achieved international recognition for his coverage of Gandhi's funeral in India in 1948.
During the Chinese Civil War in 1949, Henri covered the Kuomintang’s last six months and the Maoist People’s Republic’s first six months. He also photographed the last surviving Imperial eunuchs in Beijing. From China, he went on to Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), where he documented the gaining of independence from the Dutch. In 1950, Cartier-Bresson had traveled to the South India. He had visited Tiruvannamalai, a town in the Indian State of Tamil Nadu and photographed the last moments of Ramana Maharishi, Sri Ramana Ashram and its surroundings. A few days later he also visited and photographed Sri Aurobindo, Mother and Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry.
In 1952, Cartier-Bresson published his book Images à la sauvette, whose English-language edition was titled The Decisive Moment. Cartier-Bresson held his first exhibition in France at the Pavillon de Marsan in the Louvre in 1955. Cartier-Bresson's photography took him to many places, including China, Mexico, Canada, the United States, India, Japan, and the Soviet Union. He became the first Western photographer to photograph “freely” in the post-war Soviet Union.
Cartier-Bresson withdrew as a principal of Magnum in 1966. He retired from photography in the early 1970s and returned to drawing and painting. Henri held his first exhibition of drawings at the Carlton Gallery in New York in 1975.
Henri was deeply interested in intellectual currents that were, at the time, very much at odds with the standard Catholic-centered curriculum-psychoanalysis, Nietzschean philosophy, and even Hindu beliefs.
Politics
Between 1937 and 1939 Cartier-Bresson worked as a photographer for the French Communists' evening paper, Ce Soir. With Chim and Capa, Cartier-Bresson was a leftist, but he did not join the French Communist party.
Views
As a photographer, Cartier-Bresson felt indebted to the great films he saw as a youth. They taught him, he said, to choose precisely the expressive moment, the telling viewpoint. The importance he gave to sequential images in still photography may be attributed to his preoccupation with film. To his mind, photography provided a means, in an increasingly synthetic epoch, for preserving the real and humane world.
Quotations:
“For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.”
“To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”
“To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.”
“It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us.”
“Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.”
“The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.”
“For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.”
“In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a Leitmotiv.”
“We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.”
“I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us, which can mold us, but which can also be affected by us. A balance must be established between these two worlds—the one inside us and the one outside us.”
“Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact.”
“To take photographs is to hold one's breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeing reality. It is at that moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy."
To take photographs means to recognize—simultaneously and within a fraction of a second—both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye, and one's heart on the same axis.”
“Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes forever the precise and transitory instant. We photographers deal in things that are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth that can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory. The writer has time to reflect. He can accept and reject, accept again; and before committing his thoughts to paper he is able to tie the several relevant elements together. There is also a period when his brain "forgets," and his subconscious works on classifying his thoughts. But for photographers, what has gone is gone forever.”
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"The use of the 35-millimeter Leica was particularly relevant to Cartier-Bresson. It lent itself not only to spontaneity but to anonymity as well," a position preferred by the reticent photographer. Scharf explains that the title of Cartier-Bresson's book The Decisive Moment "refers to a central idea in his work - the elusive instant, when, with brilliant clarity, the appearance of the subject reveals in its essence the significance of the event of which it is a part, the most telling organization of forms." - Aaron Scharf
Interests
Cartier-Bresson was fond of drawing.
Connections
In 1937, Cartier-Bresson married a Javanese dancer, Ratna Mohini. They lived in a fourth-floor servants' flat in Paris at 19, rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs (now rue Danielle Casanova), a large studio with a small bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom. In 1967, he was divorced from his first wife and married Magnum photographer Martine Franck, thirty years younger than him, in 1970. The couple had a daughter, Mélanie, in May 1972.