The Postcard
A postcard that was published by E. T. W. Dennis & Sons Ltd. of London and Scarborough. The card was printed in England.
The card was posted in Aberystwyth using a halfpenny stamp on Saturday the 22nd. August 1908. It was sent to:
Mr. H. N. Street,
'Ashleigh',
Milton Road,
Heath Town,
Wolverhampton.
The pencilled message on the divided back of the card was as follows:
"c/o Mrs. Edwards,
23, Greenfield Street,
Aberystwyth.
Dear H. N.,
Arrived here safe once
again.
The sea is like park pool.
Bert."
Henri Cartier-Bresson
So what else happened on the day that Bert posted the card?
Well, the 22nd. August 1908 marked the birth in Seine-et-Marne, France, of Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French humanist photographer who was considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35 mm film. He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment.
Cartier-Bresson was one of the founding members of Magnum Photos in 1947.
In the 1970's he took up drawing - he had studied painting in the 1920's.
Henri Cartier-Bresson - The Early Years
Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup-en-Brie, Seine-et-Marne, the oldest of five children. His father was a wealthy textile manufacturer, whose Cartier-Bresson thread was a staple of French sewing kits. His mother's family were cotton merchants and landowners from Normandy, where Henri spent part of his childhood.
The Cartier-Bresson family lived in a bourgeois neighbourhood in Paris, Rue de Lisbonne, near the Parc Monceau. Henri's parents supported him financially, which enabled him to pursue photography more freely than his contemporaries. Henri also sketched.
Young Henri took holiday snapshots with a Box Brownie; he later experimented with a 3×4 inch view camera. He was raised in traditional French bourgeois fashion, and was required to address his parents with the formal 'vous' rather than 'tu'.
His father assumed that his son would take up the family business, but Henri was strong-willed, and also feared this prospect.
Cartier-Bresson attended École Fénelon, a Catholic school that prepared students for the Lycée Condorcet. A governess called "Miss Kitty" who came from across the Channel, instilled in him the love of - and competence in - the English language.
The proctor caught him reading a book by Rimbaud and reprimanded him, saying "Let's have no disorder in your studies!". Cartier-Bresson recalled:
"He used the informal 'tu', which usually
meant you were about to get a good
thrashing. But he went on, 'You're going
to read in my office'.
Well, that wasn't an offer he had to repeat."
Henri Cartier-Bresson and his Painting
After trying to learn music, Cartier-Bresson was introduced to oil painting by his uncle Louis, a gifted painter. But the painting lessons were cut short when uncle Louis was killed in the Great War.
In 1927 Cartier-Bresson entered the Lhote Academy, the Parisian studio of the Cubist painter and sculptor André Lhote. Lhote's ambition was to integrate the Cubists' approach to reality with classical artistic forms. Cartier-Bresson also studied painting with society portraitist Jacques Émile Blanche.
During this period, he read Dostoevsky, Schopenhauer, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Freud, Proust, Joyce, Hegel, Engels and Marx. Lhote took his pupils to the Louvre to study classical artists, and to Paris galleries to study contemporary art.
Cartier-Bresson's interest in modern art was combined with an admiration for the works of the Renaissance masters: Jan van Eyck, Paolo Uccello, Masaccio, and Piero della Francesca. Cartier-Bresson regarded Lhote as his teacher of "photography without a camera."
Surrealist Influence on Cartier-Bresson
Although Cartier-Bresson became frustrated with Lhote's "rule-laden" approach to art, the rigorous theoretical training later helped him identify and resolve problems of artistic form and composition in photography.
In the 1920's, schools of photographic realism were popping up throughout Europe, but each had a different view on the direction photography should take. The Surrealist movement, founded in 1924, was a catalyst for this paradigm shift. Cartier-Bresson began socialising with the Surrealists at the Café Cyrano, in the Place Blanche.
He met a number of the movement's leading protagonists, and was drawn to the Surrealist movement's technique of using the subconscious and the immediate to influence their work. The historian Peter Galassi wrote:
"The Surrealists approached photography
in the same way that Aragon and Breton
approached the street: with a voracious
appetite for the usual and unusual.
The Surrealists recognised in plain
photographic fact an essential quality that
had been excluded from prior theories of
photographic realism.
They saw that ordinary photographs,
especially when uprooted from their practical
functions, contain a wealth of unintended,
unpredictable meanings."
Cartier-Bresson matured artistically in this stormy cultural and political atmosphere. But, although he knew the concepts, he couldn't express them; dissatisfied with his experiments, he destroyed most of his early paintings.
Cambridge and the Army
From 1928 to 1929, Cartier-Bresson studied art, literature, and English at the University of Cambridge, where he became bilingual. In 1930 he was conscripted into the French Army and stationed at Le Bourget near Paris, a time about which he later remarked:
"And I had quite a hard time of it, too,
because I was toting Joyce under my
arm and a Lebel rifle on my shoulder."
Henri Cartier-Bresson's First Camera
In 1929, Cartier-Bresson's air squadron commandant placed him under house arrest for hunting without a licence. Cartier-Bresson met American expatriate Harry Crosby at Le Bourget, who persuaded the commandant to release Cartier-Bresson into his custody for a few days.
The two men both had an interest in photography, and Harry presented Henri with his first camera. They spent their time together taking and printing pictures at Crosby's home, Le Moulin du Soleil near Paris in Ermenonville, France.
Crosby later said that Cartier-Bresson looked like a fledgling, shy and frail, and mild as whey. Embracing the open sexuality offered by Crosby and his wife Caresse, Cartier-Bresson fell into an intense sexual relationship with Caresse.
Cartier-Bresson's Escape to Africa
Two years after Harry Crosby died by suicide, Cartier-Bresson's affair with Caresse Crosby ended in 1931, leaving him broken-hearted. During conscription he read Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness', which gave him the idea of escaping and finding adventure on the Côte d'Ivoire in French colonial Africa.
He survived there by shooting game and selling it to local villagers. From hunting, he learned methods which he later used in photography.
On the Côte d'Ivoire, he contracted blackwater fever, which nearly killed him. While still feverish, he sent instructions to his grandfather for his own funeral, asking to be buried in Normandy, at the edge of the Eawy Forest while Debussy's String Quartet was being played.
Although Cartier-Bresson took a portable camera (smaller than a Brownie Box) to Côte d'Ivoire, only seven of his photographs survived the tropics.
Henri Cartier-Bresson's Photography
Returning to France, Cartier-Bresson recuperated in Marseille in late 1931 and deepened his relationship with the Surrealists. He became inspired by a 1930 photograph by Hungarian photojournalist Martin Munkacsi showing three naked young African boys, caught in near-silhouette, running into the surf of Lake Tanganyika. This captured the freedom, grace and spontaneity of their movement, and their joy at being alive.
That photograph inspired him to stop painting and to take up photography seriously. He explained:
"I suddenly understood that a
photograph could fix eternity
in an instant."
He acquired a Leica camera with 50 mm lens in Marseilles that would accompany him for many years. The anonymity that the small camera gave him in a crowd or during an intimate moment was essential in overcoming the formal and unnatural behavior of those who were aware of being photographed.
He enhanced his anonymity by painting all the shiny parts of the Leica with black paint. The Leica opened up new possibilities in photography—the ability to capture the world in its actual state of movement and transformation.
Restless, he photographed in Berlin, Brussels, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and Madrid. His photographs were first exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1933, and subsequently at the Ateneo Club in Madrid.
In 1934 in Mexico, Henri shared an exhibition with Manuel Álvarez Bravo. In the beginning, he did not photograph much in his native France. It would be years before he photographed there extensively.
In 1934, Cartier-Bresson met a young Polish intellectual, a photographer named David Szymin who was called "Chim" because his name was difficult to pronounce. Szymin later changed his name to David Seymour.
Henri and Chim had much in common culturally. Through Chim, Cartier-Bresson met a Hungarian photographer named Endré Friedmann, who later changed his name to Robert Capa.
The 1935 New York Exhibition
Cartier-Bresson traveled to the United States in 1935 with an invitation to exhibit his work at New York's Julien Levy Gallery. He shared display space with fellow photographers Walker Evans and Manuel Álvarez Bravo.
Carmel Snow of Harper's Bazaar gave him a fashion assignment, but he fared poorly, since he had no idea how to direct or interact with the models. Nevertheless, Snow was the first American editor to publish Cartier-Bresson's photographs in a magazine.
While in New York, Henri met photographer Paul Strand, who did camerawork for the Depression-era documentary 'The Plow That Broke the Plains'.
Cartier-Bresson's Filmmaking
When he returned to France, Cartier-Bresson applied for a job with renowned French film director Jean Renoir. He acted in Renoir's 1936 film 'Partie de Campagne' and in the 1939 'La Règle du Jeu', for which he played a butler, and served as second assistant. Renoir made Cartier-Bresson act so he could understand how it felt to be on the other side of the camera.
Cartier-Bresson also helped Renoir make a film for the Communist party on the 200 families, including his own, who ran France. During the Spanish civil war, Cartier-Bresson co-directed an anti-fascist film with Herbert Kline, to promote the Republican medical services.
Cartier-Bresson's Photojournalism
Cartier-Bresson's first photojournalist photos to be published came in 1937 when he covered the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth for the French weekly Regards.
He focused on the new monarch's adoring subjects lining the London streets, and took no pictures of the king. His photo credit read "Cartier", as he was hesitant to use his full family name.
Henri Cartier-Bresson's Marriages
In 1937, Cartier-Bresson married a Javanese dancer, Ratna (known as "Elie") Mohini. They lived in a fourth-floor servants' flat in Paris at 19, Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs, a large studio with a small bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom where Cartier-Bresson developed film.
Between 1937 and 1939, Cartier-Bresson worked as a photographer for the French Communist evening paper, 'Ce Soir'. Along with Chim and Capa, Cartier-Bresson was a leftist, but he did not join the French Communist party.
In 1967, he was divorced from Ratna, his first wife of 30 years.
In 1970 Henri married the Belgian Magnum photographer Martine Franck who was thirty years his junior, and in May 1972, the couple had a daughter, Mélanie.
Henri Cartier-Bresson's World War II Service
When World War II broke out in September 1939, Cartier-Bresson joined the French Army as a Corporal in the Film and Photo unit.
During the Battle of France, in June 1940 at St. Dié in the Vosges Mountains, he was captured by German soldiers, and spent 35 months in prisoner-of-war camps doing forced labour under the Nazis.
Henri twice tried and failed to escape from the prison camp, and was punished by solitary confinement. His third escape was successful, and he hid on a farm in Touraine before getting false papers that allowed him to travel within France.
In France, he worked for the underground, aiding other escapees, and working secretly with other photographers to cover the Occupation and then the Liberation of France.
In 1943, he dug up his beloved Leica camera, which he had buried in farmland near the Vosges.
Cartier-Bresson's Post-War Activity
At the end of the war, Henri was asked by the American Office of War Information to make a documentary, 'Le Retour' (The Return) about returning French prisoners and displaced persons.
Towards the end of the War, rumours had reached America that Cartier-Bresson had been killed. However Henri's film on returning war refugees (released in the United States in 1947) spurred a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) instead of the posthumous show that MoMA had been preparing.
The show debuted in 1947 together with the publication of his first book, 'The Photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson'. Lincoln Kirstein and Beaumont Newhall wrote the book's text.
Magnum Photos
In early 1947, Cartier-Bresson, with Robert Capa, David Seymour, William Vandivert and George Rodger founded Magnum Photos. Capa's brainchild, Magnum was a cooperative picture agency owned by its members.
The team split photo assignments among the members. Rodger, who had quit Life in London after covering World War II, covered Africa and the Middle East. Chim, who spoke a variety of European languages, worked in Europe.
Cartier-Bresson was assigned to India and China. Vandivert would work in America, and Capa would work anywhere that had an assignment.
Maria Eisner managed the Paris office and Rita Vandivert, Vandivert's wife, managed the New York office and became Magnum's first president.
Cartier-Bresson achieved international recognition for his coverage of Gandhi's funeral in India in 1948, and the last stage of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. He covered the last six months of the Kuomintang administration, and the first six months of the Maoist People's Republic.
Henri also photographed the last surviving Imperial eunuchs in Beijing as the city was being liberated by the communists. In Shanghai, he often worked in the company of photojournalist Sam Tata, whom Cartier-Bresson had previously befriended in Bombay.
From China, Henri went on to the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), where he documented the gaining of independence from the Dutch.
In 1950, Cartier-Bresson travelled to South India where he visited Tiruvannamalai, a town in Tamil Nadu, where he photographed the last moments of Ramana Maharishi.
Magnum's mission was to "feel the pulse" of the times, and some of its first projects were 'People Live Everywhere', 'Youth of the World', 'Women of the World' and 'The Child Generation'. Magnum aimed to use photography in the service of humanity, and provided arresting, widely viewed images.
'The Decisive Moment'
In 1952, Cartier-Bresson published his book 'Images à la Sauvette', whose English-language edition was entitled 'The Decisive Moment', although the French language title actually translates as "Images on The Sly" or "Hastily Taken Images".
'Images à la Sauvette' included a portfolio of 126 of Henri's photos from the East and the West. The book's cover was drawn by Henri Matisse. For his 4,500-word philosophical preface, Cartier-Bresson took his keynote text from the 17th. century Cardinal de Retz:
"There is nothing in this world
that does not have a decisive
moment".
Cartier-Bresson applied this to his photographic style. He said:
"To me, photography is the simultaneous
recognition, in a fraction of a second, of
the significance of an event as well as of
a precise organization of forms which give
that event its proper expression".
The title 'Images à la Sauvette' came from Tériade, the Greek-born French publisher whom Cartier-Bresson admired.
Dick Simon of Simon & Schuster (father of singer-songwriter Carly Simon) came up with the English title 'The Decisive Moment'.
Margot Shore, Magnum's Paris bureau chief, translated Cartier-Bresson's French preface into English.
In 1957, Henri told the Washington Post:
"Photography is not like painting. There is
a creative fraction of a second when you
are taking a picture. Your eye must see a
composition or an expression that life itself
offers you, and you must know with intuition
when to click the camera.
That is the moment the photographer is
creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss
it, it is gone forever."
The photo Rue Mouffetard, Paris, taken in 1954, has since become a classic example of Cartier-Bresson’s ability to capture a decisive moment.
Henri held his first exhibition in France at the Pavillon de Marsan in 1955.
Cartier-Bresson's Later Career
Henri Cartier-Bresson's photography took him to many places, including China, Mexico, Canada, the United States, India, Japan, Portugal and the Soviet Union. He became the first Western photographer to photograph "freely" in the post-war Soviet Union.
In 1962, on behalf of Vogue, he went to Sardinia for three weeks.
Cartier-Bresson withdrew as a principal of Magnum (which still distributes his photographs) in 1966 in order to concentrate on portraiture and landscapes.
In 1968, he began to turn away from photography and return to his passion for drawing and painting. He admitted that perhaps he had said all he could through photography.
Cartier-Bresson retired from photography in the early 1970's, and by 1975 no longer took pictures other than an occasional private portrait; he kept his camera in a safe at his house, and rarely took it out.
Henri returned to drawing, mainly using pencil, pen and ink, and to painting. He held his first exhibition of drawings at the Carlton Gallery in New York in 1975.
Cartier-Bresson's Death and Legacy
Henri died in Céreste, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France, on the 3rd. August 2004, aged 95. No cause of death was announced. He was laid to rest in the local cemetery nearby in Montjustin, and was survived by his wife, Martine Franck, and daughter, Mélanie.
Cartier-Bresson spent more than three decades on assignment for Life and other journals. He travelled without bounds, documenting some of the great upheavals of the 20th. century — the Spanish Civil War, the liberation of Paris in 1944, the fall of the Kuomintang in China to the communists, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the May 1968 events in Paris, and the Berlin Wall.
And along the way he produced portraits of Camus, Picasso, Colette, Matisse, Pound and Giacometti. But many of his most renowned photographs, such as Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, are of seemingly unimportant moments of ordinary daily life.
Cartier-Bresson did not like to be photographed, and treasured his privacy. Photographs of Cartier-Bresson are rare. When he accepted an honorary degree from Oxford University in 1975, he held a paper in front of his face to avoid being photographed.
In a Charlie Rose interview in 2000, Cartier-Bresson noted that it wasn't necessarily that he hated to be photographed, but it was that he was embarrassed by the notion of being photographed for being famous.
Cartier-Bresson believed that what went on beneath the surface was nobody's business but his own. He did recall that he once confided his innermost secrets to a Paris taxi driver, certain that he would never meet the man again.
In 2003, he created the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris with his wife, Martine Franck, and his daughter to preserve and share his legacy.
Cinéma Vérité
Cartier-Bresson's photographs were also influential in the development of cinéma vérité. In particular, he is credited as the inspiration for the National Film Board of Canada's early work in this genre with its 1958 Candid Eye series.
Cartier-Bresson's Technique
Cartier-Bresson almost always used a Leica 35 mm rangefinder camera fitted with a normal 50 mm lens, or occasionally a wide-angle lens for landscapes. He often wrapped black tape around the camera's chrome body to make it less conspicuous.
With fast black and white film and sharp lenses, he was able to photograph events unnoticed. No longer bound by a 4×5 press camera or a medium format twin-lens reflex camera, miniature-format cameras gave Cartier-Bresson what he called:
"The velvet hand...the hawk's eye."
He never photographed with flash, a practice he saw as:
"Impolite...like coming to a concert
with a pistol in your hand."
He believed in composing his photographs in the viewfinder, not in the darkroom. He showcased this belief by having nearly all his photographs printed only at full-frame and completely free of any cropping or other darkroom manipulation. He insisted that his prints be left uncropped so as to include a few millimetres of the unexposed negative around the image area, resulting in a black frame around the developed picture.
Cartier-Bresson worked exclusively in black and white, other than a few unsuccessful attempts in color. He disliked developing or making his own prints, and showed a lack of interest in the process of photography in general, likening photography with the small camera to an "instant drawing". Technical aspects of photography were valid for him only where they allowed him to express what he saw:
"Constant new discoveries in chemistry and
optics are widening considerably our field of
action.
It is up to us to apply them to our technique,
to improve ourselves, but there is a whole
group of fetishes which have developed on
the subject of technique.
Technique is important only insofar as you
must master it in order to communicate what
you see. The camera for us is a tool, not a
pretty mechanical toy.
In the precise functioning of the mechanical
object, perhaps there is an unconscious
compensation for the anxieties and
uncertainties of daily endeavour. In any case,
people think far too much about techniques
and not enough about seeing".
Henri started a tradition of testing new camera lenses by taking photographs of ducks in urban parks. He never published the images, but referred to them as his only superstition, as he considered it a 'baptism' of the lens.
Cartier-Bresson is regarded as one of the art world's most unassuming personalities. He disliked publicity, and exhibited a ferocious shyness since his days of hiding from the Nazis during World War II. Although he took many famous portraits, his face was little known to the world at large.
This allowed Henri to work on the street undisturbed. He denied that the term "art" applied to his photographs. Instead, he thought that they were merely his gut reactions to fleeting situations that he had happened upon. He stated:
"In photography, the smallest thing
can be a great subject. The little
human detail can become a leitmotiv".
