A great photographer who, with his 35mm Leica camera, captured the human response to defining moments of history. He was a hero of mine.
Andrew Robinson
Thursday August 5, 2004
The Guardian
Henri Cartier-Bresson, photographed in 2002: he was a founding member of the photo agency Magnum in 1947. Photo: Wolfram Steinberg/AP There are few photographers whose style is instantly recognisable, like that of a great painter or film director; even fewer whose photographs have also been printed in popular magazines and newspapers throughout the world, in many cases over and over again; and only one whose life has, in addition, become legendary – Henri Cartier-Bresson, who has died aged 95. One of my cherished possessions is his book Henri Cartier-Bresson In India (1985), handsomely signed for me by its author. The preface by the film director Satyajit Ray distils Cartier-Bresson’s uniqueness as a photographer better than any other writing. His work, said Ray, was “unique in its fusion of head and heart, in its wit and its poetry … The deep regard for people that is revealed in these Indian photographs, as well as in his photographs of any people anywhere in the world, invests them with a palpable humanism. Add to this the unique skill and vision that raise the ordinary and the ephemeral to a monumental level and you have the hallmark of the greatest photographer of our time.” One is tempted to add: perhaps of all time.
The celebrated series of photographs of Gandhi, his assassination and funeral in 1948, first published in Life, show how right Ray was. There is the Mahatma in conversation seen from the back, half in shadow, with his left arm lifted in bright sunlight, palm outstretched, as if to say “What can I do?”; there is a sombre Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, at night, announcing the death to the waiting crowd; and there is the flower-covered body in the morning surrounded by veiled devotees, the funeral procession – a veritable ocean of eager Indians – with a ragged tree poking up precariously bent under its load of spectators, and Gandhi’s secretary watching the first flames of the funeral pyre, his face in a private anguish.
Cartier-Bresson had been fortunate in his timing. He was introduced to Gandhi on the afternoon of January 30 1948 and showed him the small catalogue of his one-man exhibition the previous year at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Gandhi looked through it slowly, page by page, saying nothing until he came to the photo of a man gazing at an elaborate hearse. He asked: “What is the meaning of this picture?” Cartier-Bresson told him, “That’s Paul Claudel, a Catholic poet very much concerned with the spiritual issues of life and death.” Gandhi thought for a moment, and then said, very distinctly: “Death – death – death.” Cartier-Bresson left at 4.45pm. Fifteen minutes later, the Mahatma was dead.
Stories like this, combined with the catchphrase title of the English translation of Cartier-Bresson’s first book, The Decisive Moment (1952), have tended to give the impression that Cartier-Bresson believed that story-telling, the catching on film of the historic moment, was the essence of good photography. In fact, he meant something very different; and his best work was remarkable for the way it ignored – as opposed to focused on – the usual dramatic props of the photojournalist. When he covered the 1937 coronation of George VI in London, for instance,
Cartier-Bresson photographed the crowd, not the procession. And one of his well known photographs of the communist takeover of China in 1948-49 shows an agitated queue of ordinary Shanghai Chinese “like a human accordion, squeezed in and out by invisible hands,” in his own words. It is, in fact, a gold rush – a run on a Shanghai bank – but we see no bank, no bars of gold, and no mounted police in the photograph. Instead, we concentrate on the faces of the people and the form of the crowd and are offered “the perfect visual metaphor for civil strife” (Dan Hofstadter).
Photography, wrote Cartier-Bresson, “is at one and the same time the recognition of a fact in a fraction of a second and the rigorous arrangement of the forms visually perceived which give the fact impression and significance”. An obsession with form in Cartier-Bresson was profoundly linked to his first love – drawing and painting – to which he would return in later life when he abandoned photojournalism. It also ran in his family. His great-grandfather was an artist, and an uncle was a talented and prize-winning painter; and the family business was in textiles. The Cartier-Bresson logo used to be found in every French sewing basket.
Born six years before the outbreak of the first world war, Cartier-Bresson was brought up as a member of the haute bourgeoisie of Paris, surrounded by considerable wealth and with rather formal parental relations. Though his childhood was happy enough, his school career was undistinguished, and he soon rebelled against the values of his family. Throughout his life he remained a deeply contradictory mixture of thoroughbred gentleman and quick-tempered libertarian. In his early adulthood, he was drawn to communism and surrealism – without joining either movement – and in 1927-28 studied art with the painter and critic André Lhote in Paris, and, in 1929, painting and literature in Cambridge. He became passionately absorbed in Parisian avant-garde culture, most of his friends being writers or painters, rather than photographers.
It was therefore natural that Cartier-Bresson should spend a period in Africa, following the lead of writers like André Gide and Louis Ferdinant Celine. In 1931, he travelled in west Africa, where he took up hunting in earnest and became a very good shot. Charles de Gaulle later told him that a photographer resembled a hunter – he had to aim well, fire fast, and cut out. Cartier-Bresson agreed, and was always known for the quickness of his photography (he loved the word snap); but after returning from Africa he lost his taste for hunting animals. “What I like,” he once said, “is the stalking; I have no use for the meat.” He tended to treat the printing and publication of his photographs in the same way, to the exasperation of magazine editors: it was three years before he got around to seeing prints of many of the photos he took while wandering Asia from 1947 to 1950. He made it a rule never to entangle himself in the technology of printing his own photographs.
He had used a camera in Africa, but it was not until 1932 that he acquired the light 35mm Leica that would become his inseparable companion. He used a 50mm lens, occasionally a 90mm one, that was all: no tripod, flash, reflectors or other aids. And no cropping of the image: this was one of the goals of the famous photo agency, Magnum, founded in 1947 by war photographer Robert Capa, Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour and George Rodger – to assert the right of the photographer to the integrity of his image. This insistence by Cartier-Bresson on using only available light, and on editing “in the camera” (rather than in the darkroom), influenced the then fledgling director Satyajit Ray in the making of his Apu Trilogy. (Moreover, Cartier-Bresson never took to colour film, after a few brave attempts.)
From the beginning, he made the Leica as inconspicuous as possible. The shiny parts he covered in black tape; sometimes he hid the whole camera under a handkerchief. He also tried to make the photographer as invisible as could be. Photographs of Cartier-Bresson do exist, but they are few in number: when he accepted an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in 1975, he held a paper in front of his face to avoid being snapped. Furthermore, he was always reticent about his methods and gave few interviews. Partly this was for professional reasons, but more importantly it was a true reflection of his modesty and reserve, combined with his own inability to explain how he took his classic images.
The first of these were of Mexico, where he was invited to join a surveying expedition as photographer. When the expedition collapsed, a penniless Cartier-Bresson began selling snapshots to local newspapers. By the end of 1934, his photographs had been exhibited in Mexico City, Madrid and New York city. During the 1930s they also appeared in Verve, the influential Paris-based magazine published by the Greek-born Efstratios Tériade, who became Cartier-Bresson’s lifelong aficionado.
But now the photographer abandoned still photography for filmmaking. From 1936 to 1939 he worked as an assistant to Jean Renoir in the production of Une Partie De Campagne (1936) and Renoir’s greatest film, La Règle Du Jeu (1937). The latter was, said Cartier-Bresson half a century later, “a premonition of everything that was to happen in the world”. In the first film, he played a small role as a young Catholic seminarist distracted by the sight of a charming girl’s petticoats, and in the second he selected the chateau at the centre of the film, worked on the scripts and dialogue – which had a wit and élan like Cartier-Bresson’s conversation – and organised the famous hunting scene; he shot the rabbits while the actors pretended to do so. Renoir himself “was like a great river of warmth and simplicity” – qualities wonderfully captured in Cartier-Bresson’s photoportraits of Renoir – “but Jean knew very well that I would never make a feature film. He saw that I had no imagination.” Instead, Cartier-Bresson took up documentary filmmaking, and in 1943, after escaping from a German prisoner-of-war camp, he set up a film unit for the Resistance.
He often reiterated this judgment on himself: no imagination. It seems surprising, given the extraordinary empathy evident in his photographs, particularly his distinguished, finally enigmatic portraits of both the known and the unknown. But its essential truth is clear from his drawing and painting, to which he seriously applied himself from the age of 60 (he stopped taking photos for Magnum in 1966). His subjects as an artist were always representational and drawn from life, chiefly French life – buildings, landscapes, animal skeletons in a museum, portraits of friends and models (clothed and nude, unlike most of his photographs) – they were never taken from his own imagination and fantasy, which as an artist he appears to have distrusted. Deeply aware of the traditions of painting – more so than perhaps any other leading photographer – Cartier-Bresson struggled to draw and paint, as he had never struggled to take photographs. The results were generally competent and occasionally inspired, such as certain portraits, including those of his second wife, Martine Franck (his first marriage to Ratna Mohini, a Javanese dancer, ended in divorce); they also showed a sensuous feeling for colour, absent of course from his photographs. But their main interest must derive from their being the work of a great photographer.
Cartier-Bresson felt, more keenly than most, the tension between the active life, such as the photographer’s, and the meditative life, such as that of the painter. He constantly spoke of his attraction to Buddhism, which in his view taught that “life changes every minute, the world is born and dies every minute.” But the discrepancy between himself and the Buddha belied his claims. According to his amused wife, he belonged to the sect of the Agitated Buddhists. And an old friend once told him: “But think about the statues of Buddha, Henri. Their eyes are almost always closed, while yours are almost always open.”
We must be eternally grateful for what those penetrating blue eyes chose to record over more than half a century. Whatever else he was, Cartier-Bresson was in love with life. His photographs are mysteriously alive, balletic, and his finest portraits have the complex presence of Cézanne or Rembrandt. Among the most delightful is one showing the broad back of the aged Henri Matisse sitting in his studio at Vence (near Nice) painting a portrait of a beautiful woman with a voluptuous bosom. Cartier-Bresson deeply admired the sensuous forms of Matisse (who designed the glorious jacket of The Decisive Moment), and he felt bothered by Matisse’s description of his radiant stained glass at the Dominican chapel in Vence as the culmination of his life’s work. “Monsieur Matisse,” he finally ventured, “you have never shown any serious interest in religion, and you are all the time painting these odalisques, these beautiful girls. Why didn’t you decorate, instead of this Christian church, a Temple of Voluptuous Delight? Wouldn’t that have suited your temperament better?”
Matisse listened carefully, his face grew very serious, and then he said to Cartier-Bresson, “You are right, of course. But the only institution that would ever commission a Temple of Voluptuous Delight is the French Republic, and no French government has ever made me the offer.”
In 2003, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, showcasing his and other photographers’ work, opened in Paris. He is survived by his wife Martine, herself a well known photographer, and their daughter Mélanie.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, photographer, born August 22 1908; died August 3 2004
Henri Cartier-BressonObituary: Andrew Robinson
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1276140,00.htmlHenri Cartier-Bresson 1908-2004
Eamonn McCabe
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,,1276164,00.html
Photographer who turned a hobby into an art form
Jon Henley in Paris
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1276403,00.html
The Cartier-Bresson Foundation
http://www.henricartierbresson.org
