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.

The early years

Henri was educated in Paris. He attended the École Fénelon, a Catholic school. Henri was introduced to the feel of oil painting by his Uncle Louis, a gifted painter. "Painting has been my obsession from the time that my 'mythical father', my father's brother, led me into his studio during the Christmas holidays in 1913, when I was five years old. There I lived in the atmosphere of painting; I inhaled the canvases." Uncle Louis taught him painting for a short while. However, Uncle Louis was killed during World War I.

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In 1927, at the age of 19, he entered a private art school and the Paris studio of the Cubist and sculptor André Lhote, the Lhote Academy (in the Rue d'Odessa in the Montparnasse district). Lhote's ambition was to unify the Cubist's approach to reality with classical artistic forms. Lhote tried to link the French classical tradition of Poussin and David to Modernism. Henri also studied painting with society portraitist Jacques Emile Blanche. While painting, Cartier-Bresson read Fyodor Dostoevsky, Arthur Schopenhauer, Arthur Rimbaud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stéphane Mallarmé, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Lhote took his pupils to the Louvre Museum to study classical artists and to Parisian galleries to study contemporary art. Henri's interest in modern art was combined with an admiration for the works of the Renaissance?of masterpieces from Jan van Eyck, Paolo Uccello, Masaccio and Piero della Francesca. Henri often regarded Lhote as his teacher of photography without a camera.

Related Topics:
André Lhote - Montparnasse - Jacques Emile Blanche - Fyodor Dostoevsky - Arthur Schopenhauer - Arthur Rimbaud - Friedrich Nietzsche - Stéphane Mallarmé - Sigmund Freud - Marcel Proust - James Joyce - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - Friedrich Engels - Karl Marx - Louvre Museum - Jan van Eyck - Paolo Uccello - Masaccio - Piero della Francesca

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Gradually, Henri began to feel uncomfortable with Lhote's "rule-laden" approach to art. Henri's rigorous theoretical training would later help him to confront and resolve problems of artistic form and composition in photography. At the time, schools of photographic realism were founded throughout Europe. Each school had a differing concept on how photography should develop. The photography revolution had begun, "Crush tradition! Photograph things as they are!" The Surrealist movement founded in 1924 was a big driver of this change in approach. While still studying at Lhote's studio, Henri began socializing with the Surrealists at the Café Cyrano, in the Place Blanche. He met a number of the movement's leading protagonists. Henri was particularly drawn to the Surrealist movement of linking the subconscious and the immediate to their work. Peter Galassi, in his book, Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Early Work, explains: "The Surrealists approached photography in the same way that Aragon and Breton...approached the street: with a voracious appetite for the usual and unusual...The Surrealists recognized in plain photographic fact an essential quality that had been excluded from prior theories of photographic realism. They saw that ordinary photographs, especially when uprooted from their practical functions, contain a wealth of unintended, unpredictable meanings." Henri matured artistically in this stormy cultural and political environment. He was aware of the concepts and theories mentioned but could not find an outlet of expressing this imaginatively in his paintings. He was very frustrated with his experiments and subsequently destroyed the majority of his early works.

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From 1928 to 1929, Cartier-Bresson attended Cambridge University studying English art and literature and became bilingual. He served a year of required service in the French Army. In 1930, he was served his mandatory service in the French Army. He was stationed at Le Bourget, near Paris. He remembered, "And I had quite a hard time of it, too, because I was toting Joyce under my arm and a Lebel rifle on my shoulder."

Related Topics:
Cambridge University - French Army - Lebel

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In 1931, once out of the Army and after having reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, he sought adventure on the Ivory Coast (French colonial Africa). Henri wrote, "I left Lhote's studio because I did not want to enter into that systematic spirit. I wanted to be myself. To paint and to change the world counted for more than everything in my life." He survived on the Ivory Coast by shooting game and selling it to local villagers. From hunting, he learned methods that he would later use in his photography techniques. It was there on the Ivory Coast that he contracted blackwater fever and almost died. He was so ill that he sent instructions for his own funeral. 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."

Related Topics:
Joseph Conrad - Ivory Coast - Normandy - Debussy

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Henri brought along a Brownie box camera to the Ivory Coast, but most of his film did not survive the tropics. Only seven photographs survived. He called his work on the Brownie "a quick way of drawing intuitively." When Henri returned to France, he deepened his relationship with the Surrealists.

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Henri was recuperating in Marseilles in 1931. He became inspired by a photograph shot in 1931 by Hungarian photojournalist Martin Munkacsi showing three naked young African boys running into the surf of Lake Tanganyika and was caught in near-silhouette. Munkacsi's photograph, titled, Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika, captured the freedom, grace and spontaneity of their movement and their joy at being alive. Henri said, "The only thing which completely was an amazement to me and brought me to photography was the work of Munkacsi. When I saw the photograph of Munkacsi of the black kids running in a wave I couldn't believe such a thing could be caught with the camera. I said damn it, I took my camera and went out into the street." The photograph inspired him to put down his paint-brush and to take up photography seriously. Henri acquired a Leica camera with a 50mm lens in Marseilles. This camera would accompany him for many years. He described the Leica as an extension of his eye. The anonymity it gave him in a crowd or during an intimate moment was essential in overcoming the formal and unnatural behavior of those who were aware of being photographed. The Leica opened up new possibilities in photography ? the ability to capture the world in its actual state of movement and transformation. He said, "I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, ready to 'trap' life." Restless, he photographed in Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and Madrid. He had his first photo exhibition in Madrid in 1933. He spent 1934 in Mexico, where he shared an exhibition with Manuel Alvarez Bravo. At the beginning, he did not photograph much in his native France. It would be years before he photographed there extensively.

Related Topics:
Marseilles - Martin Munkacsi - Lake Tanganyika - Leica - Berlin - Warsaw - Prague - Budapest - Madrid - Mexico - Manuel Alvarez Bravo

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In 1934 Henri met a young Polish intellectual, photographer named David Szymin. Szymin was called "Chim" because his name was difficult to pronounce. Later Szymin changed his name to David Seymour (1911?1956). Henri and Chim had much in common culturally. Before long, Chim introduced Henri to a Hungarian photographer named André Friedmann, who later changed his name to Robert Capa (1913?1954). Henri shared a studio in the early 1930s with Chim and Capa. Capa mentored and advised Henri, "Don't keep the label of a surrealist photographer. Be a photojournalist. If not you will fall into mannerism. Keep surrealism in your little heart, my dear. Don't fidget. Get moving!"

Related Topics:
David Seymour - Robert Capa

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