Few photographers have left a deeper mark on the medium than Henri Cartier-Bresson, but his path to greatness was anything but conventional.
Before picking up a Leica, he trained as a painter, immersed himself in Surrealism and travelled widely in search of a creative path. He embraced the radical politics of the 1930s, worked in film alongside Jean Renoir, witnessed war and upheaval, and helped found Magnum Photos, the agency that would transform photojournalism.
In this extract from Henri Cartier-Bresson: Here and Now, Clément Chéroux traces Cartier-Bresson's journey across continents and decades, revealing how painting, cinema, politics and chance encounters helped shape one of photography’s most distinctive voices.
Rue de Vaugirard, Paris, France, May 1968. Gelatin silver print, printed in 1984. Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation Collection, Paris. © Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation.
Beginnings in Painting
‘I always had a passion for painting’ Cartier-Bresson wrote. ‘Even as a child I did it on Thursdays and Sundays. and spent the other days dreaming of doing it.’ The little boy began to draw at a very early age. He decorated his writing with little drawings, and filled book after book with his sketches. From the mid-1920s onwards, Cartier-Bresson painted regularly under the supervision of Jacques-Émile Blanche and Jean Cottenet, before enrolling at André Lhote's academy. The oldest paintings to have survived date from 1924. They are clearly influenced by Paul Cézanne.
In André Lhote's studio, the young artist caught the bug of geometry. The canvases he painted between 1926 and 1928 are very carefully constructed, in accordance with the principle of the golden section. At the same time, however, he began to attend meetings of the Surrealists and to make collages in the style of his friend Max Ernst. By the end of the 1920s, he did less and less painting, and turned his attention to photography instead.
George Hoyningen-Huene: Henri Cartier-Bresson, New York, 1935. The Museum of Modern Art, Thomas Walther Collection, Purchase, New York © George Hoyningen-Huene : © Horst / Courtesy-Staley /
The first photographs
The very first photographs Cartier-Bresson took in the late 1920s were very much influenced by Eugène Atget. From 1925 onwards, the Surrealists had been fascinated by Atget's enigmatic, old-fashioned images and had published them in their review. But it was probably through his American friends that Cartier-Bresson discovered Atget's prints.
When Atget died in 1927, Julien Levy – whom Cartier-Bresson got to know around that time – and Berenice Abbott bought all the works from the studio of the man who had photographed old Paris. Cartier-Bresson's early photos reflect some of Atget’s favourite motifs: dummies in shop windows, piles of goods on display, old shop signs, and so on. Even the reflections in the windows that had so intrigued the first critics of Atget’s work reappear in Cartier-Bresson's photos.
Wise Gallery / NYC Crédit photographique : © 2013. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence Derrière la gare Saint-Lazare, Paris, France, 1932. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris © Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, Òcourtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
Impressions of Africa and the new vision
In October 1930, shortly after finishing his military service, Cartier-Bresson left for Africa. For almost a year he travelled through Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon and Togo, and then along the river Niger towards French Sudan. [...] By the time he returned home from Africa, Cartier-Bresson had decided that he wanted to be a photographer. During the summer of 1931, he used a spiral-bound exercise book to put together his ‘First Album’ – a collection of his African pictures together with what he considered his best images from the late 1920s. Then, accompanied by his friend André Pieyre de Mandiargues, he set off again for Germany, Poland and Hungary.
Interrupted by a few brief returns to Paris, his tour then extended to the south of France, Italy and Spain. The photographs that he took during this period were the product of a web of influences. First of all, one can easily detect elements of the New Vision, a movement that emerged from Russian Constructivism and was taken up by the Bauhaus. Cartier-Bresson had become acquainted with it through his American friends and threw himself into the style with great enthusiasm, taking many studies of texture and structure, and frequently using both high- and low-angle shots. Without doubt, this was the period when his photography was at its most abstract.
Inside spread from Henri Cartier-Bresson: Here and Now by Clément Chéroux
The attraction of surrealism
Around 1926, with the help of René Crevel, whom he got to know at Jacques-Émile Blanche’s home, Cartier-Bresson began to attend the meetings of the Surrealists. Too shy and too young to say a word, as he later wrote, he sat ‘at the end of the table’ at various cafés around Place Blanche, while André Breton would occupy the central position. From these meetings Cartier-Bresson would retain some emblematic motifs of the Surrealist imagination: objects in wrapping paper, distorted bodies, dreamers with their eyes closed, and so on. But more importantly, it was the Surrealist approach that made a deep impact on him: the subversive spirit, the taste for games, the scope given to the subconscious, the pleasure of strolling through the city, and an openness to the pleasures of chance. Cartier-Bresson was particularly receptive to the principles of convulsive beauty formulated by Breton, and he continually put them into practice throughout the 1930s. In this respect, he was one of the most authentically Surrealist photographers of his generation.
Left: Behind Saint-Lazare Station, Paris, France, 1932. National Library of France, Paris © Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation. Right: Livorno, Tuscany, Italy, 1933. Gelatin silver print, printed in the 1980s. Centre Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art. Acquired through the patronage of Yves Rocher, 2011. Formerly in the Christian Bouqueret Collection, Paris. © Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation.
Political commitment
Like most of his Surrealist friends, Henri Cartier-Bresson shared many of the political views of the Communists: vehement anti-colonialism, unswerving support for the Spanish Republicans, a profound belief in the need to ‘change life’. After the violent riots in Paris of February 1934, organized by extreme right-wing groups who at the time seemed to be threatening France with the wave of fascism that was sweeping across Europe, his political engagement took on a more concrete form. He signed several tracts calling for the forces of the left to join the struggle and to unite in action. During his trips to Mexico and the United States in 1934–35, the majority of the people he got to know were heavily involved in the revolutionary fight. By the time he returned to Paris in 1936, he had become a radical: he regularly took part in the activities of the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (AEAR), and began to work for the Communist press.
In May 1937, Cartier-Bresson was sent to London by the Communist daily paper Ce soir to photograph the coronation of George VI. The pictures he took do not show the new king, however, but focus on the people watching him. [...] By photographing the people who had turned their backs on their ruler, he was envisaging a reversal of power.
© Henri-Cartier Bresson Foundation/Magnum Photos. Henri Cartier-Bresson, Coronation of George VI, London, 12 May 1937
Film and war
Cartier-Bresson said that the cinema had taught him ‘to see’. It was while he was travelling in Mexico, in 1934, that he first gave any indication of wanting to make his own films. His interest in the cinema was closely bound up with his political convictions. Because of its narrative structure, and because it addresses a wider audience than photography, Cartier-Bresson could see that film provided a better vehicle for communicating a political message.
In the United States the following year, he learnt the rudiments of documentary film-making through the left-wing cooperative Nykino, which was led by Paul Strand and inspired by the political and aesthetic ideas emanating from Soviet Russia. Returning to Paris in 1936, Cartier-Bresson unsuccessfully approached Georg Wilhelm Pabst and then Luis Buñuel before starting to work with Jean Renoir – a collaboration that would last until the outbreak of war.
The choice of photo reportage
Cartier-Bresson's first major retrospective opened at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, in February 1947. A few months later, Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Chim, George Rodger and William Vandivert founded Magnum, a photographic cooperative that would rapidly become famous for the quality of its photojournalism. Following his MoMA exhibition, Cartier-Bresson could easily have chosen to focus exclusively on his artistic production. Instead, he decided to commit himself to the Magnum venture and to become a full-time photojournalist. From 1947 until the early 1970s, he travelled across the globe, producing hundreds of photo reports and working for virtually all the major international magazines. And despite the constraints, the tight press deadlines and the unpredictable nature of his assignments, he continued to produce work of a consistently high quality throughout those decades.
Crowd waiting outside a bank to buy gold during the final days of the Kuomintang, Shanghai, China, December 1948. Gelatin silver print, printed in the 1960s. Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation Collection, Paris. © Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation.
After photography
In the 1970s Cartier-Bresson (now in his sixties) started to take on fewer and fewer assignments, and worked in a less structured and restrictive fashion. Magnum was changing. As Cartier-Bresson saw it, the agency was losing sight of its original goals, becoming more estranged from itself with each passing day, and in 1974 he finally withdrew from the agency. The whole world had seen his photographs by now: he was a living legend. In France, he had become something of an institution, his name synonymous with photography itself – which was not a state of affairs that was likely to afford him much pleasure. Meanwhile, he was busy overseeing practical matters, organizing his archives, selling his prints, publishing books and mounting exhibitions. Although he had officially stopped photographing, he still kept his Leica handy, but the occasional photographs he took now were different, more meditative than his earlier work: he spent the bulk of his time visiting museums and exhibitions, and, above all, drawing.
Words by Clément Chéroux.
Henri Cartier-Bresson: Here and Now by Clément Chéroux is available now.
