The Hindu : Front Page : A photographer-artist, and the decisive moment

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Friday, Aug 06, 2004

Front Page

Front Page

A photographer-artist, and the decisive moment

By Michael Kimmelman

EYE OF THE CENTURY: This 1948 photograph of Jawaharlal Nehru announcing Mahatma Gandhi's death to a devastated crowd at Birla House in New Delhi was taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson, who died in France this week at the age of 95. Cartier-Bresson was master of the decisive moment. A pioneer in photojournalism, he formed a special relationship with India. He was with Gandhiji 15 minutes before his assassination. — 1948 photo © Henri Cartier-Bresson/ Magnum Photos.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the major artists of the 20th century, who used his tiny hand-held 35-millimetre Leica camera to bear humane witness to many of the century's signal events, from the Spanish Civil War to the student uprisings of 1968, has died in France. He was 95.

Cartier-Bresson seemed to know everyone and to see everything of importance throughout the middle decades of the century.

He photographed dozens of luminaries. His pictures of a convalescent Matisse during the Second World War and of Jean-Paul Sartre as a boulevardier, among others, have become icons of photographic portraiture. But Cartier-Bresson was also the archetype of the itinerant photojournalist during the heyday of photojournalism immediately after the War, before television became ubiquitous, when millions of people still saw what was happening in the world through the pictures that ran in magazines such as Life and Paris-Match.

'A responsible artist'

His photographs, later collected in numerous books, were remarkable for their empathy; Lincoln Kirstein called Cartier-Bresson "a responsible artist, responsible to his craft and to his society."

Henri Cartier-Bresson seen in a January 21, 2000 file photo in Paris. — AP.

It was Cartier-Bresson's prestige, along with that of Robert Capa and David Seymour, known as Chim, that established Magnum Photos, which they collectively founded in 1947, as the premier photo agency. Under its aegis, Cartier-Bresson went to China, India, Indonesia, Egypt, Cuba and the Soviet Union.

But he was far more than a gifted photojournalist. He combined a Rabelasian appetite for the world with a clarity of vision and intellectual order that linked him to French masters like Poussin. His wit, lyricism and ability to see the geometry of a fleeting image and capture it in the blink of an eye reshaped and created a new standard for the art of photography.

If in later years a certain sentimentality crept into his pictures, his best photographs, many of them from the 1930s, when he bore the imprint in particular of Surrealism, are among the finest works of 20th century art in any medium.

In 1932, Cartier-Bresson stuck his camera at precisely the right instant between the slats of a fence near the Gare Saint Lazare railway station in Paris. The picture shows a watery lot behind the station, strewn with debris. A man has propelled himself from a ladder that lies in the shallow water.

Photographs of puddle jumpers were cliches by 1932, but Cartier-Bresson brings to his image layer on layer of fresh and uncanny detail: the figure of a leaping dancer on a pair of posters on a wall behind the man mirrors him and his reflection in the water; the rippling circles made by the ladder echo circular bands of discarded metal debris; another poster, advertising a performer named Railowsky, puns with the railway station and also the ladder, which, flat, resembles a railroad track. (The pun works in French, too.)

Content plus geometry

No wonder other photographers could not believe Cartier-Bresson's luck, much less his skill. The term that has come to be associated with him is ``the decisive moment,'' the English title of ``Images a la Sauvette'' (``Images on the Run'' might be a closer translation), a book of his photographs published in 1952. Cartier-Bresson described ``the simultaneous recognition in a fraction of a second of the significance of an event, as well as the precise organisation of forms that give that event its proper expression.'' Content plus geometry.

Walker Evans reviewed The Decisive Moment when it was published. ``What Cartier-Bresson has is a more or less dependable ability to snap a picture,'' he wrote, ``just when a child takes off into an ecstatic state of being as he skips beside a wall that is covered with an unearthly design of some lunar-like patina.'' The photograph to which Evans referred shows a boy in Valencia, Spain, in 1933, his upturned face giving him the surreal look of someone in a trance, a look akin to divine rapture. In reality, the boy was waiting to catch a ball he had tossed in the air. It was Cartier-Bresson's genius to see instantly how the child's expression would take on new meaning if the ball weren't visible in the picture.

Nicolas Nabokov, the composer and writer, once described Cartier-Bresson as having a ``blond and pink head'' and ``gently mocking smile.'' (In Mexico, where Cartier-Bresson lived in 1934, he was called the man with cheeks ``the colour of shrimp.'') His eyes, Nabokov said, were ``like darts, sharp and clever, limpidly blue and infinitely agile.'' Later in life, those eyes were behind thick lenses when he drew. His hair thinned. Tall, wiry, studiously unostentatious, with patrician bearing, he retained a boyish, Gallic charm, and a kind of loping gait.

Proud and mischievous

Cartier-Bresson was a proud and mischievous man, thoroughly French, though Dan Hofstadter, writing in The New Yorker some years ago, compared Cartier-Bresson's appearance to ``a Scandinavian socialist schoolmaster en route to a May Day parade.''

The painter Degas once said ``it's wonderful to be famous as long as you remain unknown.'' Cartier-Bresson loved that remark and carried the photojournalistic penchant for invisibility to such attention-getting lengths as to shield his face while receiving an honorary degree at Oxford. In America, he sometimes travelled under an alias, Hank Carter.

``I'm not an actor,'' he insisted. ``What does it mean `celebrity'? I call myself an artisan. Anyone with sensitivity is potentially an artist. But then you must have concentration besides sensitivity.''

He tried to immerse himself in places before photographing them, to blend into and learn about their cultures. "I'm not interested in my photographs, nor other people's," he once said.

Photographers and others who saw him work talked about his swift and nimble ability to snap a picture undetected. They also admired his coolness under pressure.

He insisted that his works not be cropped, but otherwise disdained the technical side of photography; the Leica was all he ever wanted to use; he was not interested in developing his own pictures.

The poor rich boy

Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup, not far from Paris, on August 22, 1908, the oldest of five children in a wealthy family so puritanically frugal, he once said, that as a small boy he thought he was poor.

He was a descendant of Charlotte Corday, Marat's assassin, a fact he liked to point out. His father was a textile manufacturer; 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.

He recalled being struck, while still a teenager, by several of Martin Munkasci's photographs. "I said to myself, `How can one do that?' — that combination of plastic beauty and vitality. When I saw those photographs, I said to myself, `Now here's something to do."'

His first love

But his first love was drawing and painting. In 1927, Cartier-Bresson began to study painting with Andre Lhote, an early exponent of Cubism and an admired pedagogue, though a minor artist. Cartier-Bresson would always credit Lhote with teaching him "everything I know about photography."

Next, Cartier-Bresson studied English literature and art at Cambridge University, then in 1930 was inducted into the French Army. "And I had quite a hard time of it, too," he remembered, "because I was toting [James] Joyce under my arm and a Lebel rifle on my shoulder."

Once out of the army, he headed for Africa to hunt boar and antelope. The metaphor of shooting naturally became a familiar one in writings about his photography. Cartier-Bresson himself used it often: "approach tenderly, gently on tiptoe — even if the subject is a still life," he said. "A velvet hand, a hawk's eye — these we should all have." He also said: "I adore shooting photographs. It's like being a hunter. But some hunters are vegetarians — which is my relationship to photography." And later, explaining his dislike of the automatic camera, he said, "It's like shooting partridges with a machinegun."

With a Brownie that he had received as a gift, Cartier-Bresson began to snap photographs in Africa, but they ended up ruined. Contracting blackwater fever, he nearly died. Recuperating in Marseille in 1931, he acquired his first Leica. "I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to `trap' life — to preserve life in the act of living," he recalled. "Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photography, of some situation that was unrolling before my eyes."

The photographs that he took during the next decade, although related to ones by Atget, Lartigue, Munkacsi, Kertesz and, in their mystery, to paintings by de Chirico, were groundbreaking. He began to travel and exhibit widely in these years. His first show was in Madrid in 1933.

From the cinema, Cartier-Bresson said, he learned about narrative and the expressive moment. He directed his first film, Return to Life, in 1937, a documentary about medical aid to the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. He made occasional films after that. In the 1970s, for instance, he directed two documentaries about California for CBS television.

In 1937, he married Ratna Mohini, a Javanese dancer. He and Mohini divorced after 30 years, and in 1970 he married Martine Franck. She survives him, along with their daughter, Melanie.

A PoW for 35 months

When the Germans invaded France, Cartier-Bresson became a corporal in the army's Film and Photo Unit, but he was captured in June 1940 at Saint Die in the Vosges mountains and spent 35 months in prisoner-of-war camps. About the camps he later said, "For a young bourgeois with Surrealist ideas, breaking stone and working in a cement factory was a very good lesson."

Cartier-Bresson escaped twice and was recaptured, then succeeded on a third try. He hid on a farm in Touraine before getting false papers that allowed him to travel in France. He photographed Matisse, Bonnard and Braque for the publisher Pierre Braun during this time. As a member of the Resistance movement, he established a photo division to document the German occupation and retreat. At the end of the War, the U.S. Office of War Information hired him to direct his second film, The Return, about the homecoming of French prisoners and deportees. It was widely admired.

After the War, Cartier-Bresson visited New York City for a retrospective of his photographs at the Museum of Modern Art that had been planned a few years earlier, when the rumour was that he been killed by the Germans. The exhibition was conceived as a posthumous tribute.

In India

Shortly after that, Cartier-Bresson was in Delhi to see Mahatma Gandhi. Fifteen minutes after they parted, Cartier-Bresson heard shouts that Gandhi had been killed. He sped back. The first frame of the relevant contact sheet is captioned "place where Gandhi fell half an hour before." His photo essay on the death of Gandhi for Life shows vast, swirling pools of mourners at the funeral, the potential melodrama of the scene held in check, as always, by rigorous form.

In 1966 he quit Magnum. Efstratios Teriade, the great French publisher and art impresario, asked him if he had not perhaps said all he had to say as a photographer. "It was true," Cartier-Bresson said. "But that just made me itch to do more. I hung on two years too long at Magnum."

He had always carried a little sketchpad with him, consistent with his early training under Lhote as a painter. Drawing had been his first passion. So with help from artist-friends like Sam Szafran and Avigdor Arikha in Paris, he committed himself to drawing with an enthusiasm that people around him found remarkable. It was a sometimes difficult transition, he said. He still took photographs, but now only occasionally and on the sly.

Into his last years, Cartier-Bresson spent days drawing at his studio near the Place des Victoires or in the Louvre or in his apartment overlooking the Tuileries, from which he could see the panoramic view that Monet and Pissarro had painted a century earlier.

A few years before he died, Cartier-Bresson went to the Pompidou Centre in Paris to sketch a Matisse portrait.

When he got up to leave, he noticed a couple sitting side by side on a bench, a child resting on the man's shoulder. "A perfect composition if you cut out the woman," he said, and made a brisk chopping gesture toward her. The woman looked baffled. "Why didn't I bring my camera?" he said to himself. Then he clicked an imaginary shutter and left.

- New York Times News Service