[lit-ideas] Henri Cartier-Bresson

  • From: Robert.Paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Robert Paul)
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: 04 Aug 2004 12:36:41 PDT

Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2004 

Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson Dies  
        
PARIS (AP) - Legendary French photographer Henri
Cartier-Bresson, who traveled the world for more than a half
century capturing human drama with his camera, has died at age 95.

Cartier-Bresson shot for Life, Vogue and Harper's Bazaar
magazines, and his work inspired generations of photographers.
Cartier-Bresson became a French national treasure, though he was
famously averse to having his own picture taken or to giving
interviews.

The French Culture Ministry said Cartier-Bresson died Monday and
that funeral services were held Wednesday. Media reports said he
died in l'Ile-sur-Sorgue in the rural Vaucluse region in
southeastern France.

``He was perhaps the greatest photographer of the 20th
century,'' said John Morris, who first met Cartier-Bresson at the
door of Paris' Hotel Scribe five days after the Germans left the
city at the end of World War II.

Later when Morris was executive editor of Magnum Photos,
Cartier-Bresson worked with him. They remained lifelong friends.

Gary Knight, managing director of the cooperative photo agency,
VII, called Cartier-Bresson one of the most influential
photographers of all time.

``He inspired people, and he defined photography at that crucial
period when small cameras were coming into fashion and its entire
nature was changing,'' Knight said.

Whether recording the funeral of Mahatma Gandhi in India or
Henri Matisse at home, Cartier-Bresson sought to render the feeling
of the moment with his distinctive classical style and penchant for
geometrical composition.

``In whatever one does, there must be a relationship between the
eye and the heart,'' he once said in a rare interview. ``With the
one eye that is closed, one looks within, with the other eye that
is open, one looks without.''

With his uncanny sense of timing and intuition, Cartier-Bresson
captured the presence of places and the cultures of people as
distinct as William Faulkner and Chinese revolutionaries.

He disdained arranged photographs and artificial settings and
said photographers should shoot accurately and quickly.

His concept of photography centered on what he described as
``the decisive moment'' - the moment evoking the ultimate
significance of a given situation as all the external elements fall
perfectly into place.

Cartier-Bresson shot with a Leica, the quietest of cameras,
working only with black and white film, and notably, without a
flash. Thrusting a subject in the limelight, he once said, was a
sure way to destroy it.

He also opposed cropping pictures, saying it diluted the
picture's meanings.

While most of his international fame was generated from
worldwide exhibitions and publications including Harper's Bazaar,
Cartier-Bresson gained recognition from two documentary films he
made about medical aid to the loyalists in the Spanish Civil War
and about French prisoners of war returning home at the end of
World War II.

Cartier-Bresson was born Aug. 22, 1908, in Chanteloup outside
Paris to a wealthy textile family.

The eldest of three children, he was interested mainly in
painting. At 20, he turned his back on the lucrative family
business to study art.

In 1930, with a brownie box camera, he started dabbling in
photography. Two years later, armed with his Leica, he began a
series of photo expeditions to the French Ivory Coast, Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Austria, Germany and Italy.

After publishing photos from his travels in several major
magazines, Cartier-Bresson had his first exhibition in Madrid in
1933. Later that year he had the first of several major shows in
New York.

The brilliant, pioneering shots of the 1930s captured the urban
scene, trapping momentary visual delights of life in motion.

Critics said his most brilliant photograph was ``Behind the Gare
Saint-Lazare,'' which depicts a man leaping over a puddle and
frozen in mid-air, with his shadow forming a symmetrical V
contrasting to the vertical fence above the railroad tracks.

``Rue Mouffetard,'' a poignant shot of a grinning youngster
carrying two bottles of wine down the Left Bank market street,
became one of his most sought-after photos.

Cartier-Bresson also was drawn to the cinema and worked as an
assistant director to esteemed French director Jean Renoir on his
classic ``The Rules of the Game.''

He then turned his documentary talents to the Spanish Civil War.
At the outbreak of World War II, he was drafted into the French
army where he was a corporal in a film and photo unit captured in
the Vosges Mountains in June 1940.

After nearly three years in German prison camps, Cartier-Bresson
escaped and made his way back to Paris where he divided his time
between commercial photography and transporting ex-prisoners for
the French underground.

His work during and after the war had the feel of his
documentary films, and his pictures emerged as a stunning reportage
of the underground resistance and the political drama of postwar
Europe.

In 1945, under the aegis of the U.S. Office of War Information,
Cartier-Bresson directed ``The Return,'' a highly praised
documentary on the homecoming of French prisoners of war.

In 1947, he joined Robert Capa and David Seymour in founding
Magnum.

Since then, his photos have been featured in one-man shows in
major museums and galleries worldwide. In 1979, the cream of his
work was shown at New York's International Center of Photography
and then toured for three years to 15 cities in the United States
and Mexico.

Among the most famous of his dozen books is ``The Decisive
Moment,'' published in 1952, which Cartier-Bresson prefaced with a
quote from 17th century writer, Cardinal de Retz: ``There is
nothing in this world that does not have its decisive moment.''

In the last 25 years of his life, Cartier-Bresson largely turned
away from photography to embrace his first love, painting. By 1988,
he was spending most days sketching in pencil or charcoal at his
Paris home or at his retreat in southern France.

His Leica, protected by a handkerchief, was never out of reach.

In 1937, Cartier-Bresson married a Japanese dancer named Ratna
Mohini. In 1970, he married Martine Franck with whom he had one
daughter, Melanie.
-------------------------
Robert Paul
Reed College
 
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