Henri Cartier-Bresson Biography
Both these books I am describing today were bought at Sainsburys Books. I’ll tell you something about this fine biography of perhaps the most famous photographer of the 20th century, but in fact I mainly posted it to smuggle in that wonderful portrait shot of Henri Cartier-Bresson by Robert Delpire in 1967.
No single photographer or a camera company has ever had the sort of relationship HC-B had with Leica. Cartier-Bresson was raised into the family that owned a wealthy textile company in France, but he was simply never going into that line of work. He was just too interested in art. However, the family links did give him an introduction to the Leitz family that owned Leica. And on many occasions HC-B visited them and the Leica factories. No one promoted their products more effectively, because no one has ever used a Leica quite like HC-B.
“HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON: A Photographer And His Leica”
blog.samys.com/henri-cartier-bresson-photographer-leica/
Leica revolutionized photography by producing a portable camera that shot 35mm film. This was just the thing that suited the sort of reportage and street photography that HC-B would make famous.
What if I were to tell you that in a span of some 40 years one person took hundreds of thousands of photographs covering events and people such as:
-The Spanish civil war
-Was robbed of all his money on a trip to Mexico and stayed for more than a year living off the income from sales of his street photos
-Ended up in Manhattan and befriended Walker Evans and Paul Strand. Travelled to New Orleans with a young and soon to be famous 20 year old author, named Truman Capote.
-In April 1935 was exhibited in New York in a joint exhibition with Walker Evans (possibly the hottest photographer in America at the time).
-Joined the French infantry at the start of WW2 and became a POW in 1940. After several failed attempts to escape, he managed it successfully in early 1943. Then after the war he returned with camera to the concentration camps to report on some of the most horrific events of the century.
-Continued to take portraits of some of the most famous people in the world – he knew everybody!
-Returned to the USA and in 1947 was given a one man show at MOMA.
-Travelled to India to cover the dramatic last days of the British Raj. He photographed Gandhi and in fact was with him up until an hour before his assassination. His photographs of India in the immediate aftermath are some of the most incredible pictures in journalistic history.
-Covered the violence that led to the breakup of India and the formation of Pakistan.
-Photographed in Indonesia as the Dutch colony began to crumble.
-Was in China when Mao’s Communists took over. These photographs represent some of his most incredible work.
-Visited Iran, Iraq and Egypt (when it was still under British control before the Suez Crisis of 1956).
-Was allowed to travel to the Soviet Union just after Stalin’s death to photograph the ordinary people in a way the West had never seen before.
-He never shot in Vietnam, though his close friend Robert Capa was killed there when he stepped on a landmine.
-He continued to return to these countries and many more (including Japan) to photograph their political and social developments.
-And until 1974 (when he retired from public photography) he never stopped capturing street scenes and portraits wherever he went, because he ALWAYS carried a Leica in his pocket.
HC-B’s photographs have the appearance of having been captured in an instant (he coined the phrase “the decisive moment”), but in fact their compositions are often extremely complex. At the centre of it all was the compositional principal identified by the ancient Indians and Greeks as the “golden ratio”, and exemplified by the Renaissance Masters.
The world often appears complex and chaotic, but essentially it can be described in mathematical terms. The golden ratio (the form is a spiral) is about 1 to 1.618, and represented by the Greek letter phi, Φ. So perhaps that’s the number that gets us close to the meaning of life (with apologies to Douglas Adams, and of course Watson and Crick and the Double Helix). “The Golden Ratio for Art Beginners” www.youtube.com/watch?v=lluL6tuyif8
HC-B’s first great art teacher in Paris was André Lhote (1885-1962). Over the door of his studio was the sign, “No one enters here but for geometricians.” This he took completely to heart. As Assouline puts it, “Cartier-Bresson’s personal gospel might have begun with the words, ‘In the beginning was geometry’. There could be no better summing up of his inner torment, his quest to delve beneath appearance and find the order hidden in universal chaos, to untangle the one from the other and combine visual emotion with the best way to express it.” (p.28). It was the underlying meaning behind every HC-B photograph – order from the chaos of life. He had so embodied this principle that even in an instant he could frame a picture that represented a perfect composition. This is why we still study his work today.
Pierre Assouline has produced a very readable account which has been translated beautifully from the French by David Wilson.
* Photographs of cover and spine taken with the Leica D-Lux 7.
Henri Cartier-Bresson Biography
Both these books I am describing today were bought at Sainsburys Books. I’ll tell you something about this fine biography of perhaps the most famous photographer of the 20th century, but in fact I mainly posted it to smuggle in that wonderful portrait shot of Henri Cartier-Bresson by Robert Delpire in 1967.
No single photographer or a camera company has ever had the sort of relationship HC-B had with Leica. Cartier-Bresson was raised into the family that owned a wealthy textile company in France, but he was simply never going into that line of work. He was just too interested in art. However, the family links did give him an introduction to the Leitz family that owned Leica. And on many occasions HC-B visited them and the Leica factories. No one promoted their products more effectively, because no one has ever used a Leica quite like HC-B.
“HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON: A Photographer And His Leica”
blog.samys.com/henri-cartier-bresson-photographer-leica/
Leica revolutionized photography by producing a portable camera that shot 35mm film. This was just the thing that suited the sort of reportage and street photography that HC-B would make famous.
What if I were to tell you that in a span of some 40 years one person took hundreds of thousands of photographs covering events and people such as:
-The Spanish civil war
-Was robbed of all his money on a trip to Mexico and stayed for more than a year living off the income from sales of his street photos
-Ended up in Manhattan and befriended Walker Evans and Paul Strand. Travelled to New Orleans with a young and soon to be famous 20 year old author, named Truman Capote.
-In April 1935 was exhibited in New York in a joint exhibition with Walker Evans (possibly the hottest photographer in America at the time).
-Joined the French infantry at the start of WW2 and became a POW in 1940. After several failed attempts to escape, he managed it successfully in early 1943. Then after the war he returned with camera to the concentration camps to report on some of the most horrific events of the century.
-Continued to take portraits of some of the most famous people in the world – he knew everybody!
-Returned to the USA and in 1947 was given a one man show at MOMA.
-Travelled to India to cover the dramatic last days of the British Raj. He photographed Gandhi and in fact was with him up until an hour before his assassination. His photographs of India in the immediate aftermath are some of the most incredible pictures in journalistic history.
-Covered the violence that led to the breakup of India and the formation of Pakistan.
-Photographed in Indonesia as the Dutch colony began to crumble.
-Was in China when Mao’s Communists took over. These photographs represent some of his most incredible work.
-Visited Iran, Iraq and Egypt (when it was still under British control before the Suez Crisis of 1956).
-Was allowed to travel to the Soviet Union just after Stalin’s death to photograph the ordinary people in a way the West had never seen before.
-He never shot in Vietnam, though his close friend Robert Capa was killed there when he stepped on a landmine.
-He continued to return to these countries and many more (including Japan) to photograph their political and social developments.
-And until 1974 (when he retired from public photography) he never stopped capturing street scenes and portraits wherever he went, because he ALWAYS carried a Leica in his pocket.
HC-B’s photographs have the appearance of having been captured in an instant (he coined the phrase “the decisive moment”), but in fact their compositions are often extremely complex. At the centre of it all was the compositional principal identified by the ancient Indians and Greeks as the “golden ratio”, and exemplified by the Renaissance Masters.
The world often appears complex and chaotic, but essentially it can be described in mathematical terms. The golden ratio (the form is a spiral) is about 1 to 1.618, and represented by the Greek letter phi, Φ. So perhaps that’s the number that gets us close to the meaning of life (with apologies to Douglas Adams, and of course Watson and Crick and the Double Helix). “The Golden Ratio for Art Beginners” www.youtube.com/watch?v=lluL6tuyif8
HC-B’s first great art teacher in Paris was André Lhote (1885-1962). Over the door of his studio was the sign, “No one enters here but for geometricians.” This he took completely to heart. As Assouline puts it, “Cartier-Bresson’s personal gospel might have begun with the words, ‘In the beginning was geometry’. There could be no better summing up of his inner torment, his quest to delve beneath appearance and find the order hidden in universal chaos, to untangle the one from the other and combine visual emotion with the best way to express it.” (p.28). It was the underlying meaning behind every HC-B photograph – order from the chaos of life. He had so embodied this principle that even in an instant he could frame a picture that represented a perfect composition. This is why we still study his work today.
Pierre Assouline has produced a very readable account which has been translated beautifully from the French by David Wilson.
* Photographs of cover and spine taken with the Leica D-Lux 7.