Henri Cartier-Bresson; Guardian obit
Hyfler/Rosner
35mm Leica camera, captured the human response to defining
moments of history
BYLINE: Andrew Robinson, The Guardian
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 Andre
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 Andre
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 Teriade, 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 Regle 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 elan 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 t
o 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 Cezanne 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 Melanie.
Andrew Robinson
Henri Cartier-Bresson, photographer, born August 22 1908;
died August 3 2004