Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Instant Drawing With a Leica

In 1943, after escaping a German prison camp on his third attempt, a French corporal walked to a farm in Touraine and dug up a camera he had buried before his capture. The Leica had waited out thirty-five months of forced labour. Cartier-Bresson picked it up and went to work photographing the occupation and liberation of the country that had lost him. He had already painted the camera's chrome black, so that nobody would see him coming.

A Norman Fortune and a Cubist Education

The money came from thread. His father manufactured textiles; his mother's family were Normandy cotton merchants and landowners who counted Charlotte Corday among their ancestors. Born on 22 August 1908 at Chanteloup-en-Brie, he was schooled at the École Fénelon and the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, and from 1927 studied under the Cubist painter André Lhote. Lhote drilled him in classical composition wired to modernist geometry, a training Cartier-Bresson would later call "photography without a camera." He studied painting with Jacques Émile Blanche, spent 1928–29 at Cambridge, emerging bilingual, and was conscripted into the French Army in 1930 at Le Bourget. In 1929 the American expatriate Harry Crosby had handed him his first camera. After Crosby's suicide in 1931 and the end of his affair with Caresse Crosby, he fled to the Côte d'Ivoire, contracted blackwater fever, and came home with seven photographs.

The Picture That Ended a Painting Career

What converted him was somebody else's photograph: Martin Munkacsi's 1930 image of three boys running into the surf at Lake Tanganyika. He bought a Leica with a 50mm lens in Marseille and effectively abandoned painting. The New York dealer Julien Levy gave him a show in 1933; Madrid's Ateneo Club followed. In 1934 he met David Seymour — Chim — and through him Robert Capa. He crossed to the United States in 1935 and shared gallery space with Walker Evans and Manuel Álvarez Bravo.

Renoir, Spain, and the Communist Press

He applied to work for Jean Renoir and got it, serving as second assistant on *Partie de campagne* (1936) and *La Règle du jeu* (1939), and acting a butler because Renoir wanted him to understand the far side of a lens. During the Spanish Civil War he co-directed a film with Herbert Kline on Republican medical services. His first published photojournalism was the 1937 coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth; from 1937 to 1939 he worked for the Communist evening paper *Ce soir*. In 1937 he married the Javanese dancer Ratna Mohini.

Thirty-Five Months, Three Escapes

He joined the French Army in September 1939 as a corporal in the film and photo unit and was captured at St Dié in the Vosges in June 1940. Thirty-five months of prison camps and forced labour followed. Two escape attempts failed and earned him solitary confinement; the third worked. Working for the Resistance, he helped other escapees and documented the war's end. The American Office of War Information then commissioned *Le Retour* (1944–45), a documentary on returning prisoners and displaced persons. That film produced a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1947, and his first book, with texts by Lincoln Kirstein and Beaumont Newhall.

Magnum, Gandhi's Ashes, Mao's Peking

In early 1947 he co-founded Magnum Photos with Capa, Chim, William Vandivert and George Rodger: a picture agency owned by the photographers themselves, with Maria Eisner running Paris and Rita Vandivert in New York as its first president. International fame arrived with Gandhi's funeral in 1948. In China he covered the last six months of the Kuomintang and the first six of the People's Republic, including the last surviving Imperial eunuchs of Beijing. He photographed Indonesia's independence, and in 1950 Ramana Maharshi's final days at Tiruvannamalai. He became the first Western photographer permitted to work freely in the Soviet Union, admitted after Stalin's death in 1953. MoMA notes that he nonetheless photographed America and France more than anywhere else, and made close to a thousand portraits of artists and writers.

Images à la Sauvette

The 1952 book carried 126 photographs behind a Matisse cover. Its French title means something closer to "images on the sly"; the American publisher called it *The Decisive Moment*, and the phrase hardened into doctrine. His own definition was more exacting: photography as "the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression." He told the *Washington Post* in 1957 that "there is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture… Once you miss it, it is gone forever." The practice was austere. Black and white, Leica, 50mm, never flash — flash was "impolite… like coming to a concert with a pistol." He composed in the viewfinder rather than the darkroom, disliked printing, and insisted his pictures be printed full-frame and uncropped, the black border of unexposed negative left visible as proof that nothing had been rescued after the fact. Photography, he said, was instant drawing. He baptised new lenses by photographing ducks in city parks; his only superstition.

Putting the Camera Down

In 1966 he withdrew as a principal of Magnum to concentrate on portraits and landscape. He divorced Ratna in 1967 after thirty years, and by 1968 had turned away from photography altogether, convinced he had said what it could say for him, and gone back to drawing. He married the Magnum photographer Martine Franck, thirty years his junior, in 1970; their daughter Mélanie was born in May 1972. His first drawing exhibition came at New York's Carlton Gallery in 1975 — the same year he accepted an honorary Oxford degree while holding a sheet of paper in front of his face. The Grand Prix National de la Photographie followed in 1981, the Hasselblad Award in 1982, a Lucie lifetime achievement award in 2003.

Why Henri Is Called a Genius

The quality at issue is not intellect in the ordinary sense. It is pattern recognition at speed: the capacity to see, through a viewfinder, in a fraction of a second, that a walking man, a puddle, a railing and a poster have arranged themselves into a composition that will hold — and to fire before it dissolves. Lhote's Cubist drilling supplied the geometry; the Leica supplied the reaction time. His own formula, the simultaneous recognition of an event's significance *and* of the precise organisation of forms expressing it, describes a fusion of narrative and formal judgement that most photographers can only manage one at a time. MoMA, mounting his 2010 retrospective, credited him with "seizing lasting images from the flux of experience" — admiration without the word.

The counter-case is real. This is craft and perception, not thought. He disliked technique, refused to make his own prints, and treated the darkroom as another man's department. A textile fortune bought him years of not needing to earn, and friendships with Capa, Chim and Renoir put him where history was happening. *The Decisive Moment* was a publisher's title, not his; the doctrine built on that mistranslation has been flattening his actual work ever since. But the full-frame printing is the strongest argument for the defence: he was betting in public, every time, that the composition had been found rather than made.

Legacy

In 2003 he created the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris with Franck and Mélanie; it moved to the Marais in 2018. He died on 3 August 2004 at Céreste in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, nineteen days short of ninety-six, and was buried at Montjustin. The Prix Nadar came posthumously in 2006 for *Scrapbook*. In 2011 *Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare* sold at Christie's for $590,455. Magnum, the more durable invention, outlived him.