Henri Cartier-Bresson - New York Times obituary
TurbulenceGloting
August 4, 2004
Cartier-Bresson, Who Photographed the 'Decisive Moment,' Dies
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
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.