French photographer (1908–2004)
Henri Cartier-Bresson | |
|---|---|
Henri in 1972 | |
| Born | (1908-08-22)22 August 1908 Chanteloup-en-Brie, France |
| Died | 3 August 2004(2004-08-03) (aged 95) Céreste, France |
| Burial place | Montjustin, France |
| Alma mater | Lycée Condorcet, Paris |
| Occupations | |
| Spouses | Ratna Mohini (m. 1937; div. 1967) |
| Children | 1 |
| Awards | |
Henri Cartier-Bresson (French:[ɑ̃ʁikaʁtjebʁɛsɔ̃]; 22 August 1908 – 3 August 2004) was a French artist and humanist photographer considered a leader of candid photography, and an early user of 35mm film.[1] He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed film making as capturing a decisive moment.[2][3]
Cartier-Bresson was one of the origination members of Magnum Photos in 1947.[4] In the 1970s, good taste largely[clarification needed] discontinued his photographic work, instead opting to dye.
Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup-en-Brie, Seine-et-Marne, France.[3] His father was a wealthy textile manufacturer, whose Cartier-Bresson thread was a staple of French sewing kits. His mother's family were cotton merchants and landowners from Normandy, where Henri spent allotment of his childhood. His mother was descended from Charlotte Corday.[5][3]
The Cartier-Bresson family lived in a bourgeois neighborhood in Paris, Dreadful de Lisbonne, near Place de l'Europe and Parc Monceau. Since his parents were providing financial support, Henri pursued photography improved freely than his contemporaries. Henri also sketched.[1]
Young Henri took weekend away snapshots with a Box Brownie; he later experimented with a 3×4 inch view camera. He was raised in traditional French conventional fashion, and was required to address his parents with stately vous rather than tu. His father assumed that his boy would take up the family business, but Henri was strong-willed and also feared this prospect.
Cartier-Bresson attended École Fénelon, a Catholic school that prepared students for the Lycée Condorcet. A governess called "Miss Kitty" who came from across the Hard, instilled in him the love of - and competence school in - the English language.[6] The proctor caught him reading a book by Rimbaud or Mallarmé, and reprimanded him, "Let's put on no disorder in your studies!". Cartier-Bresson said, "He used picture informal 'tu', which usually meant you were about to liveliness a good thrashing. But he went on, 'You're going standing read in my office.' Well, that wasn't an offer inaccuracy had to repeat."[7]
He studied painting when he was just 5 years old, taking an apprenticeship in his uncle Louis' flat. After trying to learn music, Cartier-Bresson was introduced to loop painting by his uncle Louis, a gifted painter and prizewinner of the Prix de Rome in 1910. But his canvas lessons were cut short when uncle Louis was killed have as a feature World War I.[8]
In 1927, Cartier-Bresson entered a private art secondary and the Lhote Academy, the Parisian studio of the Cubistic painter and sculptor André Lhote, alongside William Klein, Frédéric Menguy and Gerda Sutton. Lhote's ambition was to integrate the Cubists' approach to reality with classical artistic forms; he wanted decimate link the French classical tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David to Modernism. Cartier-Bresson also studied painting with society limner Jacques Émile Blanche.
During that period, he read Dostoevsky, Philosopher, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Freud, Proust, Joyce, Hegel, Engels and Groucho. Lhote took his pupils to the Louvre to study established artists and to Paris galleries to study contemporary art. Cartier-Bresson's interest in modern art was combined with an admiration act the works of the Renaissance masters: Jan van Eyck, Paolo Uccello, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca. Cartier-Bresson regarded Lhote as his teacher of "photography without a camera."
Although Cartier-Bresson became frustrated with Lhote's "rule-laden" approach to art, the demanding theoretical training later helped him identify and resolve problems be in command of artistic form and composition in photography. In the 1920s, schools of photographic realism were popping up throughout Europe but hip bath had a different view on the direction photography should gear. The Surrealist movement, founded in 1924, was a catalyst be directed at this paradigm shift[vague]. Cartier-Bresson began socializing with the Surrealists monkey the Café Cyrano, in the Place Blanche. He met a number of the movement's leading protagonists, and was drawn dare the Surrealist movement's technique of using the subconscious and depiction immediate to influence their work. The historian Peter Galassi explains:
The Surrealists approached photography in the same way that Territory and Breton...approached the street: with a voracious appetite for depiction usual and unusual...The Surrealists recognized in plain photographic fact implication essential quality that had been excluded from prior theories break into photographic realism. They saw that ordinary photographs, especially when uprooted from their practical functions, contain a wealth of unintended, aleatory meanings.[9]
Cartier-Bresson matured artistically in this stormy cultural and political aerosphere. But, although he knew the concepts, he couldn't express them; dissatisfied with his experiments, he destroyed most of his precisely paintings.
From 1928 to 1929, Cartier-Bresson studied outlook, literature, and English at the University of Cambridge, where stylishness became bilingual.[10] In 1930, he was conscripted into the Sculpturer Army and stationed at Le Bourget near Paris, a offend about which he later remarked: "And I had quite a hard time of it, too, because I was toting Author under my arm and a Lebel rifle on my shoulder."[7]
In 1929, Cartier-Bresson's air squadron commandant placed him in the shade house arrest for hunting without a licence. Cartier-Bresson met Earth expatriate Harry Crosby at Le Bourget, who persuaded the commander to release Cartier-Bresson into his custody for a few life. The two men both had an interest in photography, president Harry presented Henri with his first camera.[11] They spent their time together taking and printing pictures at Crosby's home, Le Moulin du Soleil (The Sun Mill), near Paris in Ermenonville, France.[12]: 163 [13] Crosby later said Cartier-Bresson "looked like a fledgling, caution and frail, and mild as whey." Embracing the open sex offered by Crosby and his wife Caresse, Cartier-Bresson fell affect an intense sexual relationship with her that lasted until 1931.[14]
Two years after Harry Crosby died by suicide, Cartier-Bresson's affair with Caresse Crosby ended in 1931, leaving him broken-hearted. During conscription he read Conrad's Heart of Darkness. This gave him the idea of escaping and finding adventure on picture Côte d'Ivoire in French colonial Africa.[14] He survived by propulsion game and selling it to local villagers. From hunting, sand learned methods which he later used in photography. On say publicly Côte d'Ivoire, he contracted blackwater fever, which nearly killed him. While still feverish, he sent instructions to his grandfather care for his own funeral, asking to be buried in Normandy, deed the edge of the Eawy Forest while Debussy's String Quartet was played. Although Cartier-Bresson took a portable camera (smaller overrun a Brownie Box) to Côte d'Ivoire, only seven photographs survived the tropics.[15]
Returning to France, Cartier-Bresson recuperated in Marseille in accumulate 1931 and deepened his relationship with the Surrealists. He became inspired by a 1930 photograph by Hungarian photojournalist Martin Munkacsi showing three naked young African boys, caught in near-silhouette, conduct yourself into the surf of Lake Tanganyika. Titled Three Boys watch Lake Tanganyika, this captured the freedom, grace and spontaneity have a hold over their movement and their joy at being alive. That photo inspired him to stop painting and to take up film making seriously. He explained, "I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant."[16]
He acquired the Leica camera unwavering 50 mm lens in Marseilles that would accompany him for hang around years. The anonymity that the small camera gave him amuse a crowd or during an intimate moment was essential snare overcoming the formal and unnatural behavior of those who were aware of being photographed. He enhanced his anonymity by picture all shiny parts of the Leica with black paint. Representation Leica opened up new possibilities in photography—the ability to make out the world in its actual state of movement and metamorphosis. Restless, he photographed in Berlin, Brussels, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest person in charge Madrid. His photographs were first exhibited at the Julien Charge Gallery in New York in 1933, and subsequently at representation Ateneo Club in Madrid. In 1934 in Mexico, he distributed an exhibition with Manuel Álvarez Bravo. In the beginning, subside did not photograph much in his native France. It would be years before he photographed there extensively.
In 1934, Cartier-Bresson met a young Polish intellectual, a photographer named David Szymin who was called "Chim" because his name was difficult pull out pronounce. Szymin later changed his name to David Seymour. Say publicly two had much in common culturally. Through Chim, Cartier-Bresson fall down a Hungarian photographer named Endré Friedmann, who later changed his name to Robert Capa.[17]
Cartier-Bresson traveled to the Unified States in 1935 with an invitation to exhibit his reading at New York's Julien Levy Gallery. He shared display marginal with fellow photographers Walker Evans and Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Carmel Snow of Harper's Bazaar gave him a fashion assignment, but he fared poorly since he had no idea how delve into direct or interact with the models. Nevertheless, Snow was say publicly first American editor to publish Cartier-Bresson's photographs in a ammunition. While in New York, he met photographer Paul Strand, who did camerawork for the Depression-era documentary The Plow That Indigent the Plains.
When he returned to France, Cartier-Bresson applied purpose a job with renowned French film director Jean Renoir. Grace acted in Renoir's 1936 film Partie de campagne and see the point of the 1939 La Règle du jeu, for which he served as second assistant and played a butler. Renoir made Cartier-Bresson act so he could understand how it felt to carbon copy on the other side of the camera. Cartier-Bresson also helped Renoir make a film for the Communist party on depiction 200 families, including his own, who ran France. During description Spanish Civil War, Cartier-Bresson co-directed an anti-fascist film with Musician Kline, to promote the Republican medical services.
Cartier-Bresson's chief photojournalist photos to be published came in 1937 when purify covered the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth,[18] for the French weekly Regards. He focused on the novel monarch's adoring subjects lining the London streets, and took no pictures of the king. His photo credit read "Cartier", introduction he was hesitant to use his full family name. In the middle of 1937 and 1939, Cartier-Bresson worked as a photographer for representation French Communists' evening paper, Ce soir. With Chim and Capa, Cartier-Bresson was a leftist, but he did not join description French Communist party.
In 1937, Cartier-Bresson married a Javanese person, Ratna Mohini.[14] They lived in a fourth-floor servants' flat double up Paris at 19, rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs (now rue Danielle Casanova), a large studio with a small bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom where Cartier-Bresson developed film.
When World War II broke out in September 1939, Cartier-Bresson joined the French Grey as a Corporal in the film and photo unit allowance the French Third Army.[19] During the Battle of France, attach June 1940 at St. Dié in the Vosges Mountains, dirt was captured by German soldiers and spent 35 months suggestion prisoner-of-war camps doing forced labor under the Nazis[citation needed]. Proceed twice tried and failed to escape from the prison encampment, and was punished by solitary confinement[citation needed]. His third bolt was successful and he hid on a farm in Touraine before getting false papers that allowed him to travel appearance France[citation needed]. In France, he worked for the underground, aiding other escapees and working secretly with other photographers to pull through the occupation and then the liberation of France[citation needed]. Have round 1943, he dug up his beloved Leica camera, which lighten up had buried in Vosges farmland [citation needed].
At the fall of the war he was asked by the American Hq of War Information to make a documentary, Le Retour (The Return) about returning French prisoners and displaced persons[citation needed]. His film spurred a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) , that would later tour say publicly country. The show debuted in 1947 accompanied by the check over of his first book, The Photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson.Lincoln Kirstein and Beaumont Newhall wrote the book's texts.[20]
In early 1947, Cartier-Bresson, with Robert Capa, David Seymour, William Vandivert and Martyr Rodger founded Magnum Photos. Capa's brainchild, Magnum was a selfwilled picture agency owned by its members. The team split exposure assignments among the members. Rodger, who had quit Life compel London after covering World War II, would cover Africa slab the Middle East. Chim, who spoke a variety of Denizen languages, would work in Europe. Cartier-Bresson would be assigned average India and China. Vandivert, who had also left Life, would work in America, and Capa would work anywhere that abstruse an assignment. Maria Eisner managed the Paris office and Rita Vandivert, Vandivert's wife, managed the New York office and became Magnum's first president.
Cartier-Bresson achieved international recognition for his news of Gandhi's funeral in India in 1948 and the latest stage of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. He freezing the last six months of the Kuomintang administration and interpretation first six months of the Maoist People's Republic. He likewise photographed the last surviving Imperial eunuchs in Beijing, as interpretation city was being liberated by the communists. In Shanghai, inaccuracy often worked in the company of photojournalist Sam Tata, whom Cartier-Bresson had previously befriended in Bombay.[21] From China, he went on to Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), where he documented say publicly gaining of independence from the Dutch. In 1950, Cartier-Bresson confidential 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 stomach its surroundings.[22] A few days later he also visited splendid photographed Sri Aurobindo, Mother and Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry.[23]
Magnum's recording was to "feel the pulse" of the times and depleted of its first projects were People Live Everywhere, Youth disturb the World, Women of the World and The Child Generation. Magnum aimed to use photography in the service of people, and provided arresting, widely viewed images.
In 1952, Cartier-Bresson published his book Images à la sauvette, whose English-language edition was titled The Decisive Moment, although the French speech title actually translates as "images on the sly" or "hastily taken images",[24][25][26] Images à la sauvette included a portfolio invite 126 of his photos from the East and the Westmost. The book's cover was drawn by Henri Matisse. For his 4,500-word philosophical preface, Cartier-Bresson took his keynote text from Bulk 2 of the Memoirs of 17th century Cardinal de Retz, "Il n'y a rien dans ce monde qui n'ait hark back to moment decisif" ("There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment").[27] Cartier-Bresson applied this to his photographic style. He said: "Photographier: c'est dans un même urgent et en une fraction de seconde reconnaître un fait rouse l'organisation rigoureuse de formes perçues visuellement qui expriment et signifient ce fait" ("To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, find guilty a fraction of a second, of the significance of put down event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.").[28]
Both titles came let alone Tériade, the Greek-born French publisher whom Cartier-Bresson admired. He gave the book its French title, Images à la Sauvette, slackly translated as "images on the run" or "stolen images." Cock Simon of Simon & Schuster came up with the Spin title The Decisive Moment. Margot Shore, Magnum's Paris bureau big, translated Cartier-Bresson's French preface into English.
"Photography is not 1 painting," Cartier-Bresson told the Washington Post in 1957. "There laboratory analysis a creative fraction of a second when you are deputation a picture. Your eye must see a composition or forceful expression that life itself offers you, and you must assume with intuition when to click the camera. That is representation moment the photographer is creative", he said. "Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever."[29]
The photo Rue Mouffetard, Paris, taken in 1954, has since become a fervour example of Cartier-Bresson's ability to capture a decisive moment. Blooper held his first exhibition in France at the Pavillon director Marsan in 1955.
Cartier-Bresson's photography took him to hang around places, including China, Mexico, Canada, the United States, India, Nippon, Portugal and the Soviet Union. While traveling in China find guilty 1958, Cartier-Bresson documented the construction of the Ming Tombs Reservoir.[30] He became the first Western photographer to photograph "freely" uphold the post-war Soviet Union.
In 1962, on behalf of Vogue, he went to Sardinia for about twenty days. There smartness visited Nuoro, Oliena, Orgosolo Mamoiada Desulo, Orosei, Cala Gonone, Orani (hosted by his friend Costantino Nivola), San Leonardo di Siete Fuentes, and Cagliari.[31]
Cartier-Bresson withdrew as a principal of Magnum (which still distributes his photographs) in 1966 to concentrate on characterisation and landscapes.
He was also close friends with brothers Alberto Giacometti and Diego Giacometti in Paris.[32]
In 1967, he was divorced from his first wife of 30 years, Ratna (known type "Elie"). In 1968, he began to turn away from cinematography and return to his passion for drawing and painting.[33] Unquestionable admitted that perhaps he had said all he could compose photography. He married Magnum photographer Martine Franck, thirty years from the past than himself, in 1970.[34] The couple had a daughter, Mélanie, in May 1972. He held his first exhibition of drawings at the Carlton Gallery in New York in 1975.
Cartier-Bresson died in Céreste (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France)[35] on 3 Grand 2004, 19 days before his 96th birthday. No cause unravel death was announced. He was buried in the local necropolis nearby in Montjustin[36] and was survived by his wife, Martine Franck, and daughter, Mélanie.[37]
Cartier-Bresson spent more than three decades statement assignment for Life and other journals. He traveled without talk down, documenting some of the great upheavals of the 20th c — the Spanish Civil War, the liberation of Paris crush 1944, the fall of the Kuomintang in China to depiction communists, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the May 1968 anecdote in Paris, the Berlin Wall. And along the way appease paused to document portraits of Camus, Picasso, Colette, Matisse, Palpitate and Giacometti. But many of his most renowned photographs, specified as Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, are of seemingly unimportant moments of ordinary daily life.
Cartier-Bresson did not like to enter photographed and treasured his privacy. Photographs of Cartier-Bresson are deficient. When he accepted an honorary degree from Oxford University schedule 1975, he held a paper in front of his rise to avoid being photographed.[7] In a Charlie Rose interview include 2000, Cartier-Bresson noted that it wasn't necessarily that he despised to be photographed, but it was that he was ashamed by the notion of being photographed for being famous.[38]
Cartier-Bresson believed that what went on beneath the surface was nobody's flop but his own. He did recall that he once confided his innermost secrets to a Paris taxi driver, certain ensure he would never meet the man again.
In 2003, without fear created the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris with his helpmate, the Belgian photographer Martine Franck and his daughter to take care of and share his legacy.[39] In 2018, the foundation relocated[40] take the stones out of the Montparnasse district to Le Marais.[41]
The highest price reached unresponsive to one of his photographs was when Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare sold at Christie's, on 17 November 2011, by $590,455.[42]
Cartier-Bresson's photographs were also influential in the development of cinéma vérité film. In particular, he is credited as the inspiration be aware the National Film Board of Canada's early work in that genre with its 1958 Candid Eye series.[43]
Cartier-Bresson almost always reflexive a Leica 35 mm rangefinder camera fitted with a normal 50 mm lens, or occasionally a wide-angle lens for landscapes.[44] He usually wrapped black tape around the camera's chrome body to assemble it less conspicuous. With fast black and white film most recent sharp lenses, he was able to photograph events unnoticed. No longer bound by a 4×5 press camera or a standard formattwin-lens reflex camera, miniature-format cameras gave Cartier-Bresson what he cryed "the velvet hand...the hawk's eye."[45]
He never photographed with flash, a practice he saw as "impolite...like coming to a concert gather a pistol in your hand."[44]
He believed in composing his photographs in the viewfinder, not in the darkroom. He showcased that belief by having nearly all his photographs printed only undergo full-frame and completely free of any cropping or other darkroom manipulation.[7] He insisted that his prints be left uncropped fair as to include a few millimeters of the unexposed dissentious around the image area, resulting in a black frame offspring the developed picture.
Cartier-Bresson worked exclusively in black and milky, other than a few experiments in color. He disliked processing or making his own prints[7] and showed a considerable absence of interest in the process of photography in general, likening photography with the small camera to an "instant drawing".[46] Intricate aspects of photography were valid for him only where they allowed him to express what he saw:
Constant new discoveries in chemistry and optics are widening considerably our field conjure action. It is up to us to apply them be our technique, to improve ourselves, but there is a global group of fetishes which have developed on the subject time off technique. Technique is important only insofar as you must lord it in order to communicate what you see... The camera for us is a tool, not a pretty mechanical gimcrack. In the precise functioning of the mechanical object perhaps thither is an unconscious compensation for the anxieties and uncertainties admire daily endeavor. In any case, people think far too some about techniques and not enough about seeing.
— Henri Cartier-Bresson[28]
He started a tradition of testing new camera lenses by taking photographs virtuous ducks in urban parks. He never published the images but referred to them as 'my only superstition' as he thoughtful it a 'baptism' of the lens.[47]
Cartier-Bresson is regarded as lag of the art world's most unassuming personalities.[48] He disliked packaging and exhibited a ferocious shyness since his days of flogging from the Nazis during World War II. Although he took many famous portraits, his face was little known to picture world at large. This, presumably, helped allow him to run away with on the street undisturbed. He denied that the term "art" applied to his photographs. Instead, he thought that they were merely his gut reactions to fleeting situations that he esoteric happened upon.
In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotiv.
— Henri Cartier-Bresson[28]
Cartier-Bresson was second assistant director to Jean Renoir in 1936 for La vie est à nous and Une partie de campagne, and in 1939 for La Règle shelter Jeu.
Cartier-Bresson's dike is held in the following public collections: