Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004), a French photographer, is labelled as the father of photojournalism, a master of candid, unbiased, photography along with being considered one of the most important portrait photographers of the 20th century. He is accredited with promoting the development or the so-called ‘street photography’ that relied on life reportage of un-staged scenes that greatly, if not directly, influenced following generations of photographers. In fact, Henri spent over thirty years on assignment for Life Magazine and other journals. He travelled and visually documented some of ‘the greatest upheavals of the 20th century’ taking him to a vast variety of locations in period of important civil movements; including the Spanish civil war, the liberation of Paris in 1944, the 1968 Paris student rebellion, the Chinese fall of Kuomintang, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union after the Stalin’s death, the United States during the post WWII boom and phases of Europe’s entrance into ‘modernity’. His way with the camera, an almost exclusive alliance with a Leica 35 mm range-finder, became the first Western photographer to openly and freely take to the streets of the post-war Soviet Union.
Henri observed the realities of his time, presenting the periods of change in an honest and direct form to the Western public. Ironically, he disliked being photographed, considering it an invasion of personal space, of individual privacy. However, his flash-less black and white images, allowed for future photographers to reach a broader audience through the medium of public publications, such as Life Magazine. His use of the lens created a new potential benefits of images that captured the impartial and sincere, un-staged and unbias.
Henri’s first photojournalist assignment was published in 1937 as he documented the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth for the French weekly Regards. Unlike the typical image of royalty, Henri chose to uniquely record the images of the public, the ‘adoring subjects lining the streets of London'. However, Henri’s monumental achievement that brought him international recognition took place in 1948 for his coverage of Ghandi’s funeral and in the following year for his photographs of the first six months of Maoist People’s Republic.
The son of five children of a bourgeois French family had the financial support of his parents to develop his interest with photography which initiated as a young boy and a Box Brownie camera. Though his artistic beginnings began with a failed attempt at music, Henri turned to the brush under the influence of his uncle, a gifted painter. It was not until 1927 during his entrance at Lhote Academy in the studio of the Cubist painter and sculptor André Lhote that exposed Henri to the world of the classical and the modern, in art and literature, that provided him with the necessity and regulations to train the eye to ‘photography without a camera’. Lhote’s ‘rule-laden’ confronted Henri with the lessons to resolve artistic and compositional problems important in the production of ‘art’.
The Surrealist movement, founded in 1924, was a main turning point in his early education. Though he never became an official member, he did attend and participate in group meetings that formed his ideologies revolving around theories of the subconscious and the immediate.
After his affair with Caresse Crosby ended in 1931, Henri parted to a drastic trip to the Ivory Coast. Even though his stay was cut short due to his contact with blackwater fever, which almost killed him, the few remaining photographs taken demonstrate his early talent.
In 1932 Carmel Snow of Harper’s Bazaar offered Henri an assignment which was not exactly considered to be a strategic move on behalf of the photographer but gave him his first American publication. While in New York for the shooting, he met Paul Strand who introduced Henri to filming which brought him to be involved in a variety of projects, even taking him to documenting the Spanish civil war in the interest of anti-fascism.
When WWII broke out, Henri joined the French Army in the Film and Photo unit. After being captured by Germans in 1940, his escape encouraged his choice to join the underground movement to cover the Occupation and Liberation of France in 1943. At the end of the war, he was asked by the American Office of War Information to document Le Retour (The Return) of French prisoners and displaced persons. The images offer a dramatic and realistic reality of the results of war and how the innocent civilians are treated and ‘cured’ on their way through DDT praying, finger printing, and form filling.In 1948 Henri, along with Robert Capa, David Seymour, William Vandivert and George Rodger, founded Magnum Photos, a cooperative picture agency whose mission was to ‘feel the pulse’ of the times and to serve humanity through the publication to a wide audience. In 1952 Henri published his first individual book The Decisive Moment with a cover drawn by Henri Matisse.
In 1966 he withdrew from Magnum to transform his artistic direction to portraiture and landscapes, changing route from his prior interests that took him to documentary assignments across the globe. By the 1970s his camera was practically retired, with the exception of a few portraits, and to reinventing his early career with the brush.
Henri’s photographic oeuvre demonstrates the life of an extraordinary individual who chose to document the ‘reality’ of his time, presenting the West with the bluntness of modernity, a combination of victories and defeats, wealth and starvation, happiness and depression in a period of historical change. Opposing the traditional trend applied to the camera as a tool for propaganda and fashion, Henri brought the machine a widely popular and interesting application, an authentic eye to and of the masses, breaking the taboo on the denied existence of the cruel and undeniable truths that impacted the majority presented in magazines and on film.
Bibliography:
‘Henri Cartier-Bresson’ in Wikiedia online, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Cartier-Bresson
‘Biography’ in Henri Carier Bresson Organization, http://www.henricartierbresson.org/hcb/HCB_bio00_en.htm
‘Henri CartierBresson: The Modern Century’ in Museum of Modern Art, http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/968
‘Henri Cartier-Bresson biography’ in Biography, http://www.biography.com/people/henri-cartier-bresson-9240139
Assouline, P. (2005). Henri Cartier-Bresson: A Biography. London: Thames & Hudson.
Galassi, Peter (2010). Henri Cartier-Bresson: the Modern Century. London: Thames and Hudson
Montier, J. (1996). Portrait: First Sketch. Henri Cartier-Bresson and the Artless Art (p. 12). New York: Bulfinch Press.
Warren, J (2005), Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography. Routledge
Image Links:
http://mediastore4.magnumphotos.com/
http://erickimphotography.com/
http://i1192.photobucket.com/
http://www.jacksonfineart.com/
https://webbnorriswebb.files.wordpress.com
https://webbnorriswebb.files.wordpress.com
http://www.henricartierbresson.org/
http://thispublicaddress.com/
http://www.sfmoma.org/
http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_10_VForm&ERID=24KL53ZMYN
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