Henri Cartier-Bresson; NY Times obit
Hyfler/Rosner
August 4, 2004
Cartier-Bresson, Who Photographed the 'Decisive Moment,'
Dies
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN NY Times
Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the major artists of the 20th
century, who used his tiny hand-held 35-millimeter Leica
camera to bear humane witness to many of the century's
signal events, from the Spanish Civil War to the German
occupation of France to the partition of India to the
Chinese revolution to the student uprisings of 1968, has
died in France, the Ministry of Culture announced today. He
was 95.
Cartier-Bresson seemed to know everyone and to see
everything of importance throughout the middle decades of
the century. Even in his later years, when he more or less
abandoned photography to draw, he remained an astonishing
live wire who liked to say that his approach to life had
been shaped by Buddhism. His wife, the photographer Martine
Franck, described him to the Dalai Lama as "a Buddhist in
turbulence."
He photographed dozens of luminaries: his pictures of a
convalescent Matisse during the Second World War and of
Sartre as a boulevardier, among others, have become icons of
photographic portraiture. But he was also the archetype of
the itinerant photojournalist during the heyday of
photojournalism immediately after the war, before television
became widespread, when millions of people still saw what
was happening in the world through the pictures that ran in
magazines like Life and Paris-Match.
His photographs, later collected in numerous books, were
remarkable for their empathy; Lincoln Kirstein called
Cartier-Bresson "a responsible artist, responsible to his
craft and to his society."
It was Cartier-Bresson's prestige, along with that of Robert
Capa and David Seymour, known as Chim, that established
Magnum Photos, which they collectively founded in 1947, as
the premier photo agency. Under its aegis, Cartier-Bresson
went to China, India, Indonesia, Egypt, Cuba and the Soviet
Union.
But he was far more than a gifted photojournalist. He
combined a Rabelasian appetite for the world with a clarity
of vision and intellectual order that linked him to French
masters like Poussin. His wit, lyricism and ability to see
the geometry of a fleeting image and capture it in the blink
of an eye reshaped and created a new standard for the art of
photography. If in later years a certain sentimentality
crept into his pictures, his best photographs, many of them
from the 1930's, when he bore the imprint in particular of
Surrealism, are among the finest works of 20th century art
in any medium.
In 1932, he stuck his camera at precisely the right instant
between the slats of a fence near the Gare Saint Lazare
railway station in Paris. The picture shows a watery lot
behind the station, strewn with debris. A man has propelled
himself from a ladder that lies in the shallow water.
Photographs of puddle jumpers were clichés by 1932, but
Cartier-Bresson brings to his image layer on layer of fresh
and uncanny detail: the figure of a leaping dancer on a pair
of posters on a wall behind the man mirrors him and his
reflection in the water; the rippling circles made by the
ladder echo circular bands of discarded metal debris;
another poster, advertising a performer named Railowsky,
puns with the railway station and also the ladder, which,
flat, resembles a railroad track. (The pun works in French,
too.)
No wonder other photographers couldn't believe
Cartier-Bresson's luck, much less his skill. The term that
has come to be associated with him is "the decisive moment,"
the English title of "Images á la Sauvette" ("Images on the
Run" might be a closer translation), a book of his
photographs published in 1952. Cartier-Bresson described
"the simultaneous recognition in a fraction of a second of
the significance of an event, as well as the precise
organization of forms that give that event its proper
expression." Content plus geometry.
Walker Evans reviewed "The Decisive Moment" when it was
published. "What Cartier-Bresson has is a more or less
dependable ability to snap a picture," he wrote, "just when
a child takes off into an ecstatic state of being as he
skips beside a wall that is covered with an unearthly design
of some lunar-like patina."
The photograph to which Mr. Evans referred shows a boy in
Valencia, Spain, in 1933, his upturned face giving him the
surreal look of someone in a trance, a look akin to divine
rapture. In reality, the boy was waiting to catch a ball he
had tossed in the air. It was Cartier-Bresson's genius to
see instantly how the child's expression would take on new
meaning if the ball weren't visible in the picture.
Nicolas Nabokov, the composer and writer, once described
Cartier-Bresson as having a "blond and pink head" and
"gently mocking smile." (In Mexico, where Cartier-Bresson
lived in 1934, he was called the man with cheeks "the color
of shrimp.") His eyes, Nabokov said, were "like darts, sharp
and clever, limpidly blue and infinitely agile." Later in
life, those eyes were behind thick lenses when he drew. His
hair thinned. Tall, wiry, studiously unostentatious, with
patrician bearing, he retained a boyish, Gallic charm, and a
kind of loping gait. He was a proud and mischievous man,
thoroughly French, though Dan Hofstadter, writing in The New
Yorker some years ago, compared Cartier-Bresson's appearance
to "a Scandinavian socialist schoolmaster en route to a May
Day parade."
Degas once said "it's wonderful to be famous as long as you
remain unknown." Cartier-Bresson loved that remark and
carried the photojournalistic penchant for invisibility to
such attention-getting lengths as to shield his face while
receiving an honorary degree at Oxford. In America, he
sometimes traveled under an alias, Hank Carter.
"I'm not an actor," he insisted. "What does it mean
`celebrity'? I call myself an artisan. Anyone with
sensitivity is potentially an artist. But then you must have
concentration besides sensitivity."
He tried to immerse himself in places before photographing
them, to blend into and learn about their cultures. "I'm not
interested in my photographs, nor other people's," he once
said.
Photographers and others who saw him work talked about his
swift and nimble ability to snap a picture undetected
(sometimes he even masked the shiny metal parts of his
camera with black tape). They also admired his coolness
under pressure. Louis Malle remembered that despite all the
turmoil at the peak of the student protests in Paris, in May
1968, Cartier-Bresson took photographs at the rate of only
about four per hour.
He insisted that his works not be cropped, but otherwise
disdained the technical side of photography; the Leica was
all he ever wanted to use; he was not interested in
developing his own pictures.
"My contact sheets may be compared to the way you drive a
nail in a plank," he said. "First you give several light
taps to build up a rhythm and align the nail with the wood.
Then, much more quickly, and with as few strokes as
possible, you hit the nail forcefully on the head and drive
it in."
Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup, not far from
Paris, on Aug. 22, 1908, the oldest of five children in a
wealthy family so puritanically frugal, he once said, that
as a small boy he thought he was poor. He was a descendant
of Charlotte Corday, Marat's assassin, a fact he liked to
point out. His father was a textile manufacturer; at one
time almost every French sewing kit was stocked with
Cartier-Bresson thread. On his mother's side were cotton
merchants and landowners in Normandy, where he spent part of
his childhood.
He was educated in Paris. "I went to the Ecole Fénelon, a
Catholic school that prepared you for the Lycée Condorcet,
and one day the proctor there caught me reading a volume of
Rimbaud or Mallarmé, right at the start of the school year,
in the lower sixth. He said to me, `Let's have no disorder
in your studies!' He used the informal `tu' - which usually
meant you were about to get a good thrashing. But he went
on, `You're going to read in my office.' Well, that wasn't
an offer he had to repeat."
He read, among other things, Proust, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche
and a book on Schopenhauer that he said led him to Romain
Rolland and to eastern philosophy. "That had a huge effect
on me. I had never been a Christian believer. My mother once
said, `Poor dear, if only you had a good Dominican
confessor, you wouldn't be in such a fix!"'
He recalled being struck, while still a teenager, by several
of Martin Munkasci's photographs. "I said to myself, `How
can one do that?' - that combination of plastic beauty and
vitality. When I saw those photographs, I said to myself,
`Now here's something to do.' "
But his first love was drawing and painting.
Cartier-Bresson's uncle ("my mythical father," he called
him) had been a painter; he was killed in World War I. His
father also drew, as a pastime, and Cartier-Bresson to the
end of his life preserved at home some of his father's
drawings, along with some by a great-grandfather, which he
showed proudly to anyone who asked about them.
He remembered seeing Seurat's painting of nude models in a
gallery window. "That made its impact on me. I was 15.
Before that I'd been a boy scout. The totem name they gave
me was `quivering eel' because I was always slipping off
somewhere." He went, among other places, to drink mint
liqueurs in a brothel on the Rue des Moulins, where Degas
and Toulouse-Lautrec had gone to draw. And he also went to
the Café Cyrano, in the Place Blanche, to sit at the
Surrealists' table while Andre Breton held forth. "The
trouble was, I never got close enough to the center of the
table," he joked, "so I missed a lot of what Breton was
saying."
In fact, Surrealism greatly affected him; among other
things, it gave him a respect for free, iconoclastic
expression.
In 1927, Cartier-Bresson began to study painting with André
Lhote, an early exponent of Cubism and an admired pedagogue,
though a minor artist. Cartier-Bresson would always credit
Lhote with teaching him "everything I know about
photography." Lhote sought to link the French classical
tradition of Poussin and David to modernism. Many people
have pondered the split between Cartier-Bresson's
photographs, with their instantaneity, and his later
drawings, with their hesitant, even painstaking lines. The
link between them involved a belief in strict discipline and
order, traceable to Lhote.
Next he studied English literature and art at Cambridge
University, then in 1930 was inducted into the French army.
He was stationed at Le Bourget, near Paris. "And I had quite
a hard time of it, too," he remembered, "because I was
toting Joyce under my arm and a Lebel rifle on my shoulder."
As a young man steeped in Rimbaud and looking for adventure,
he wanted to see more of the world. Once out of the army, he
headed for Africa to hunt boar and antelope. The metaphor of
shooting naturally became a familiar one in writings about
his photography. Cartier-Bresson himself used it often:
"approach tenderly, gently . . . on tiptoe - even if the
subject is a still life," he said. "A velvet hand, a hawk's
eye - these we should all have." He also said: "I adore
shooting photographs. It's like being a hunter. But some
hunters are vegetarians - which is my relationship to
photography." And later, explaining his dislike of the
automatic camera, he said, "It's like shooting partridges
with a machine gun."
With a Brownie that he had received as a gift, he began to
snap photographs in Africa, but they ended up ruined.
Contracting blackwater fever, he nearly died. The way he
told the story, a witch doctor got him out of a coma. While
still feverish, he wrote a postcard to his grandfather
asking that he be buried in Normandy, at the edge of the
Eawy forest, with Debussy's string quartet to be played at
the funeral. An uncle wrote back: "Your grandfather finds
all that too expensive. It would be preferable that you
return first."
Recuperating in Marseille in 1931, he acquired his first
Leica. "I prowled the streets all day, feeling very
strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to `trap' life -
to preserve life in the act of living," he recalled. "Above
all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of
one single photography, of some situation that was unrolling
before my eyes."
The photographs that he took during the next decade,
although related to ones by Atget, Lartigue, Munkacsi,
Kertesz and, in their mystery, to paintings by de Chirico,
were groundbreaking. He began to travel and exhibit widely
in these years. He had his first show in Madrid in 1933;
then another in 1934 in Mexico City, jointly with Manuel
Álvarez Bravo, and yet another in 1935 at the Julien Levy
Gallery in New York City.
While in New York, he met the photographer Paul Strand
("maitre," Cartier-Bresson always called him). Making movies
at the time, Strand inspired Cartier-Bresson to think about
doing the same, and soon after his return to France he got a
job with Jean Renoir, the director, as a second assistant on
"A Day in the Country" and "The Rules of the Game." He also
helped Renoir on a propaganda film for the French Communist
Party denouncing the 200 most prominent families in France,
Cartier-Bresson's among them. Although he never joined the
Party, his sympathy for the poor and downtrodden, and his
dislike of class pretense, became essential to the choice
and content of his photographs.
From the cinema, he said, he learned about narrative and the
expressive moment. He directed his first film, "Return to
Life," in 1937, a documentary about medical aid to the
Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. He made occasional films
after that. In the 1970's, for instance, he directed two
documentaries about California for CBS television.
In 1937, he married his first wife, Ratna Mohini, a Javanese
dancer. He liked to recall the time that Max Jacob
introduced him to a fortune teller. "There are certain
things you can't just make up," Cartier-Bresson said. "In
1932, she told me that I would marry someone who would not
be from India, or from China, but would also not be white.
And in 1937 I married a Javanese woman. This fortune teller
also told me that the marriage would be difficult, and that
when I was old I would marry someone much younger than I and
would be very happy."
He and Ms. Mohini divorced after 30 years, and in 1970 he
married Martine Franck. She survives him, along with their
daughter, Mélanie.
When the Germans invaded France, Cartier-Bresson became a
corporal in the army's Film and Photo Unit, but he was
captured in June 1940 at Saint Dié in the Vosges mountains
and spent 35 months in prisoner-of-war camps. About the
camps he later said, "For a young bourgeois with Surrealist
ideas, breaking stone and working in a cement factory was a
very good lesson."
He escaped twice and was recaptured, then succeeded on a
third try. He hid on a farm in Touraine before getting false
papers that allowed him to travel in France. He photographed
Matisse, Bonnard and Braque for the publisher Pierre Braun
during this time. As a member of the resistance movement, he
established a photo division to document the German
occupation and retreat. At the end of the war, the United
States Office of War Information hired him to direct his
second film, "The Return," about the homecoming of French
prisoners and deportees. It was widely admired.
After the war, he visited New York City for a retrospective
of his photographs at the Museum of Modern Art that had been
planned a few years earlier, when the rumor was that he been
killed by the Germans. The exhibition was conceived as a
posthumous tribute.
Dorothy Norman, a gossip columnist, interviewed him when he
arrived in the city, a few months early, on assignment for
Harper's Bazaar to photograph the Brooklyn Bridge. During
the war, Cartier-Bresson told her: "I became increasingly
less interested in what one might call an `abstract'
approach to photography.
"In whatever one does, there must be a relationship between
the eye and the heart. One must come to one's subject in a
pure spirit. One must be strict with oneself. There must be
time for contemplation, for reflection about the world and
the people about one. If one photographs people, it is their
inner look that must be revealed."
Shortly after that, Cartier-Bresson was in Delhi, India, to
see Mahatma Gandhi. He photographed Gandhi and showed him
the catalog of the Museum of Modern Art exhibition. Fifteen
minutes after they parted, Cartier-Bresson heard shouts that
Gandhi had been killed. He sped back. The first frame of the
relevant contact sheet is captioned "place where Gandhi fell
half an hour before." His photo essay on the death of Gandhi
for Life Magazine shows vast, swirling pools of mourners at
the funeral, the potential melodrama of the scene held in
check, as always, by rigorous form.
Critics have sometimes complained about the intrusiveness of
photojournalists like Cartier-Bresson. John Malcolm Brinnin,
who traveled across the United States with him in 1946,
later called him "a humanitarian indifferent to people."
Cartier-Bresson heard this criticism and replied: "There is
something appalling about photographing people. It is
certainly some sort of violation; so if sensitivity is
lacking, there can be something barbaric about it."
In 1966 he quit Magnum. Efstratios Tériade, the great French
publisher and art impresario, asked him if he had not
perhaps said all he had to say as a photographer. "It was
true," Cartier-Bresson said. "But that just made me itch to
do more. I hung on two years too long at Magnum."
He had always carried a little sketch pad with him,
consistent with his early training under Lhote as a painter.
Drawing had been his first passion. So with help from
artist-friends like Sam Szafran and Avigdor Arikha in Paris,
he committed himself to drawing with an enthusiasm that
people around him found remarkable. It was a sometimes
difficult transition, he said. He still took photographs,
but now only occasionally and on the sly.
His drawings of figures and landscapes and his copies of
other art owed a big debt to Giacometti, another old friend.
He often described drawing as a meditative activity,
photography as intuitive, but added that "there is no
aesthetic peculiar to photography or drawing." He said that
few people would care about his drawings if he were not a
famous photographer. One of his remarks, that photography is
"a marvelous profession while it remains a modest one,"
helps to explain his skepticism toward his own drawings. He
took pride in them, but like photographs or people, they
were admirable to the degree they remained humble.
Into his last years, he spent days drawing at his studio
near the Place des Victoires or in the Louvre or in his
apartment overlooking the Tuileries, from which he could see
the panoramic view that Monet and Pissarro had painted a
century earlier.
He claimed in later life that he no longer even wanted to
talk about photography. "It's like when you're divorced and
people keep asking you about your former wife," he said.
"There something indecent about it." Still, he could not
help talking about it. Likewise, he said that he did not
grant interviews ("they're like police interrogations," was
a phrase of his), though he did grant them, coyly telling
all interviewers that they were merely having a friendly
conversation and requesting that any tape recorder be
stashed away. Then some bon mot would pop into his head and,
pleased with himself, he would look at the machine, eyebrows
raised, as if to say, "So?"
A few years before he died, he went to the Pompidou Center
in Paris to sketch a Matisse portrait. Balanced on his
favorite shooting stick, nose buried in his drawing, he paid
no attention to the tourists who snapped his picture and
videotaped him; they seemed unaware of who he was but
charmed simply by the sight of an old man sketching.
When he got up to leave, he noticed a couple sitting side by
side on a bench, a child resting on the man's shoulder. "A
perfect composition if you cut out the woman," he said, and
made a brisk chopping gesture toward her. The woman looked
baffled. "Why didn't I bring my camera?" he said to himself.
Then he clicked an imaginary shutter and left.