Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson (August 22, 1908 – August 3 2004) was a French photographer. He was commonly considered the undisputed master of candid photography using the small-format 35mm rangefinder camera.

Childhood

Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in 1908 in Chanteloup-en-Brie, near Paris, France and was the oldest of five children. His family was wealthy. His father was a textile manufacturer, who liked to sketch in his spare time; 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. The Cartier-Bresson family lived in a grand bourgeois neighborhood near the Europe Bridge. They provided him with the financial support to develop his interests in photography in a more independent manner than many of his contemporaries. He owned a Box Brownie as a boy, using it for taking holiday snapshots, and later experimented with a 3 x 4 view camera. He was raised in traditional French bourgeois fashion. He was required to address his parents as "vous", rather than the familiar "tu". His father assumed that Henri would take up the family business, but Henri was headstrong and was "strongly appalled" by working for the family business.

Related Topics:
Chanteloup-en-Brie - Bourgeois

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~