Henri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson was born to a wealthy merchant family, in 1908, Chanteloup-en-Brie, near Paris and was raise in the prevailing bourgeois fashion. He was a willful young boy, who refused to be groomed to take over the family business. Instead he decided to study art, having being introduced by his uncle who was a noted painter. At the age of 19, he enrolled at Lhote Academy, a private art school owned and run by Andre Lhote, a painter and sculptor as well as studying portraiture with Jacques Emile Blanche. Henri Cartier-Bresson had a love for both renaissance and contemporary art.
In 1924, the emerging surrealistic style impacted on his art. In the interim, Cartier-Bresson went to study English Art & Literature at the University of Cambridge, and became quite fluent in the language.
Henri Cartier-Bresson then completed the compulsory military service, near Paris and then went to seek adventure in French colonial Africa, where he contract blackwater fever, nearly ending his life. Only seven of the photos he took with a portable camera, in Cote d’Ivoire, actually survived the humidity of the tropics. Whilst recuperating in Marseilles in 1931, he saw a photograph taken by Hungarian photojournalist Martin Munkasci - the photograph of three young African boys, running into Lake Tanganyika, that he realized the potential of photography to expressed artistic truth. The spontaneity is what really caught his eye and put him on the path to discovery. It made him rush out with his camera, to see what he could catch on camera, in the same essence of spontaneity.
Henri Cartier-Bresson traveled to Berlin, Brussels, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and Madrid capturing everything that caught his eye, using an inconspicuous portable Leica camera. His photographs were exhibited at in New York, at the Julien Levy Gallery, and then in Madrid. He traveled to Mexico, in 1934 and met up with Mexican photographer Manual Alverez Bravo with whom a shared an exhibition. He returned to New York in 1935, with Bravo to share an exhibition with fellow photographer Walker Evans. Many other opportunities were presented whilst in the US and even had a number of his photos published in the Harpers Bazaar, through Carmel Snow.
On his return to France in 1936, Cartier-Bresson applied for a job with Jean Renoir, the famed French film director who put him into two of his films as an actor to give him the exposure needed for him to understand relationships between photographer and the subject. Henri Cartier-Bresson was quite active as a leftist during WW2, and was captured by Germans and spent 35 months as a prisoner of war. He attempted three escapes, and was put in solitary confinement on two occasions, with the third attempt he succeeded.
In 1947, Magnum Photos was formed as a cooperative photo agency with Cartier-Bresson being one of the founding members along with Robert Capa, David Seymour, William Vandivert and George Rodger.He achieved international recognition in 1948, after covering the funeral of the great Mahatma Gandhi in India and then went on to photograph the last of the Grand Imperial Eunuchs of Beijing China, as the transition from Imperial States to the of Communism unfolded..
Henri Cartier-Bresson published books, Photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson and The Decisive Moment, the finally retired from photography in the early 1970s to pursue his love of drawing and painting.
Henri Cartier-Bresson covered more important historical moments that any other photographer of the 20th Century. He, being an intensely private perhaps refused to be photographed being quite camera shy. There are few public pictures of Cartier-Bresson that exist. Henri Cartier-Bresson married twice, and had a daughter with his second wife photographer Martine Franck in 1970. He died in 2004 at the age of 95, having left quite a legacy.
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