Henri Cartier-BressonHenri Cartier-Bresson, the Frenchman who raised photojournalism to an art form with a small hand-held Leica camera and a vision that photography should capture what he called "the decisive moment", has died at 95.
"Henri Cartier-Bresson was a giant," said Robert Sobieszek, chief curator of photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "He did for photography what Picasso did for painting. He invented a form that we now call street photography. Without him, it wouldn't exist. He changed the way we see photographs."
From his earliest days as a working photographer, Cartier-Bresson travelled the world on assignment for European and American magazines, including Look, Life and Paris Match. He had a knack for being in the right part of the world just as history was unfolding. He said his intention was to "trap" life and preserve it in the act of being lived.
In India, he photographed Mahatma Gandhi an hour before his assassination, and he stayed to cover the funeral. In 1954, he was among the first Western photographers to record life after the death of Stalin.
"Of all forms of expression," he noted in his book The Decisive Moment (1952), "photography is the only one which seizes the instant in its flight. We look for the evanescent, the irreplaceable; that is our constant concern ..."
"To take photographs is to hold one's breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeting reality. It is at that moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy," he wrote.
During his decades-long career as a working photographer, Cartier-Bresson repeatedly crossed the divide between art and photojournalism. From 1947, when he and colleagues, Robert Capa, George Rodger, William Vandivert and David Seymour, known as "Chim", founded the Magnum agency for photojournalists, he helped raise the status of the profession. Magnum quickly earned a reputation as an elite operation whose members ranked among the most talented in the business.
But even as he helped build photojournalism, Cartier-Bresson insisted he was first of all an artist. His work was exhibited in museums from Madrid to Mexico City.
The year that he helped found Magnum, he attended the opening of his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City. Seven years later, in 1954, curators at the Louvre in Paris broke precedents and gave him the museum's first exhibition by a single living photographer.
He never felt quite comfortable with his dual identity as an art photographer and photojournalist. "I am not a journalist," he said in an interview of 1975. "I simply sniff around and take the temperature of a place." In Spain, France, Mexico and the American South, he took photographs of flea markets, ghettos and city centres and the people who roamed them.
The spontaneous look of his images sprang from a carefully planned geometric composition. Geometry gave form to his photographs the way grammar disciplines creative writing.
He eschewed gimmicky photography, worked exclusively in black and white, and declared himself allergic to flash photographs. He was also not interested in printing. Once he made a photograph, he never cropped it or allowed editors to do so.
His most memorable photographs include Rue Mouffetard, the shot of a grinning youngster carrying two bottles of wine down a Paris street; and Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, which shows a man frozen in midair as he leaps over a puddle.
He made memorable portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, writer William Faulkner and artist Henri Matisse.
Few of Cartier-Bresson's news photographs covered the actual event. At Gandhi's funeral he looked past the funeral bier and the dignitaries to the ordinary people in the crowd, their faces wrung out in confusion and fear.
Born in 1908 into a family of wealth and title in the city of Chanteloup near Paris, he was the eldest of five children and the least likely to carry on the family textile business. Henri was more interested in accompanying his mother, Marthe, to concerts or poetry readings.
She tried to instil her Catholic faith in him as well, but he could not abide religious institutions. Later in life he embraced Buddhism, a philosophy that values the present moment as the only reality.
At 16, Cartier-Bresson made friends with the French surrealist poet, André Breton, and painter Max Ernst. He attended the meetings where they explored their ideas about the unconscious mind and automatic reflexes as essential tools for an artist."I was too young to belong," he said of the group."I sat at the end of the table and did not speak."
At 19 he studied drawing and painting with André Lhote, a lesser-known cubist painter who taught him to build a strong, geometric composition, invaluable for his future work.
He went to Cambridge University, where he studied literature but dropped out after a year. An adventurer with a restless soul, he travelled to Ivory Coast in 1930, with a plan to support himself as a big-game hunter. Several months after he arrived, he developed blackwater fever.
In a letter to his grandfather in France, he said he was dying and asked to be buried in Normandy to the music of Claude Debussy. His grandfather's response gives some idea of the wealthy family patriarch's sense of humour. "Your grandfather finds that too expensive," an uncle wrote of the funeral plans. "It would be preferable that you return first."
He returned home but had recorded his African visit with a simple Box Brownie box camera and moisture in the camera rendered the images unusable.
At 24 he bought his first Leica in Marseille, where he went to recover from his illness in 1932, and from then on he wore a camera over his shoulder and referred to it as the extension of his eye.
By 1936 he was back in Paris, curious to learn about moving pictures, and arranged an interview with Jean Renoir, who gave him a job as an assistant director. He worked with Renoir on two of his best-known films, A Day in the Country and Rules of the Game, in which he had a cameo role. Renoir's gentle affection for human nature became more pronounced in Cartier-Bresson's photographs as well.
At about that time Cartier-Bresson married Ratna Mohini, a Javanese poet and dancer. The marriage ended in divorce 30 years later.
He gave up the erratic movie industry for a job as a photographer for Ce Soir, the French Communist daily and worked with Alliance, an agency whose members included Chim and Capa.
In 1939, at the onset of the second World War, he entered the French army as a member of the film and photo unit but within months was captured by Germans. He spent 35 months in prison camps, and friends and colleagues in the US presumed him dead.
In the Nazi hands, he taunted the guards continually. He told Vanity Fair magazine last year, "I was a very poor labourer. I would sabotage by doing things very, very slowly ... the least work possible. We would tell the Germans we can't work without red wine."
On his third attempt, Cartier-Bresson escaped from prison. He hid in farmhouses in Touraine until Resistance fighters could provide the false papers that allowed him to return home. Once in Paris he joined the Resistance and organised its photographic unit to document occupation, the Allied invasion and the final Nazi retreat.
In 1945 he made a documentary commissioned by the US government. The Return follows the homecoming of French war prisoners and deportees.
He spent most of 1947 in New York City, living in Harlem and the Chelsea district, taking photographs and studying filmmaking with Paul Strand, best known as a still-photographer.
Photojournalists who followed Cartier-Bresson's lead developed a spontaneity in their style as well as a taste for the unpredictable that paid tribute to the master's work.
"The great photographers of the 35-millimetre camera came after him: Robert Frank, Gary Winograd, Lee Friedlander, Gilles Peress," Dr Sobieszek said. "They all documented street scenes, using Leicas, and they all knew about the decisive moment."
But Cartier-Bresson grew weary of photography in the early 1970s and returned to his first love: drawing and painting. He took few photographs after 1973 and allowed few photographers to take his picture.
He married the photographer Martine Franck, once a member of Magnum, in 1970. They had one daughter, Melanie, and she had one child, a daughter Natasha.
At 94 he, his wife and daughter opened the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris, to house and display his work and the work of other photographers. The opening was accompanied by a retrospective exhibition at the French National Library that opened in April 2003.
He dismissed those applying the term "art" to his pictures. They were just gut reactions to moments he happened on.
"Bow, arrow, goal and ego melt into one another," he once said. "As soon as I take a bow and shoot, everything becomes so clear and straightforward and ridiculously simple."
Henri Cartier-Bresson: born August 22nd, 1908; died August 3rd, 2004.