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Henri Cartier-Bresson’s quick eye has made him the photographer of the century, writes Liz Jobey
The slender figure loping between the shadows of the trees in the Tuileries Gardens is moving so rapidly – despite the stick – that he passes through them almost invisibly, just one more vertical black line flickering among the trunks. Watching him recalls a famous Giacometti sketch, Walking Man, which seems appropriate for this man, who took some of the greatest portraits of Giacometti towards the end of his life.
As he disappears into the streets at the same rapid clip, I marvel at his anonymity in the city where he has lived, on and off, for more than three-quarters of a century. It is not because there aren’t photographs of him or that he seldom goes out in public, but he has a kind of physical neutrality, a lightness and delicacy of presence that must always have been an advantage.
It is not to do with his appearance: of medium height, with a neat-featured face, a smooth, high forehead and pale blue eyes that can fix on you in conversation with an expression both expectant and intimidating. It is more to do with a kind of negative energy that gives him the ability to blend instantly with his surroundings, to lose himself in a crowd, to disappear at will.
Henri Cartier-Bresson seems happy to trade a little self-deprecation for invisibility, and I suspect it isn’t just because it means he can avoid the problems of celebrity, but because he still has the advantage of surprise. The pleasure of photography for him, he says, is the pleasure of the hunter. And if this sounds predatory, it should be said that his prey is a chance encounter rather than a pre- selected victim.
“In photography, you must always be disponible, open, mentally and physically,” he says. And what still distinguishes his pictures – after three generations of black-and-white photographers have tried to copy them – is that they retain the energy of a casual snapshot and at the same time contain so many complex and apparently chance inter- relationships that, in the mixture of the ordinary and the mysterious, they seem to suggest something of what it is to be alive.
It is more than 25 years since he officially gave up photography, but he is still the most famous living photographer in the world. Even people who aren’t much interested in photography know his name and recognise some of his pictures, though they can’t always attribute them. And so many people have followed his style that his own reputation has suffered, particularly in circles where young photographers more allied to the art world than to journalism find his pictures “old-fashioned” and too “classical”.
In the years since his retirement, black- and-white reportage has virtually disappeared from the magazine press, and contemporary photography is directed towards the art market and publishing, rather than the weekly supplements. But many highly respected photographers today were first inspired by Cartier-Bresson and still look upon him as the master.
These days he lives in Paris with his wife, Martine Franck, also a photographer and member of Magnum, the photo co-operative he founded with Robert Capa, George Rodger and David Seymour 50 years ago. He is the last surviving founder-member.
Cartier-Bresson will be 90 in August, but there’s little chance of a quiet life. Four major public galleries in London alone are holding exhibitions of his work this year and the BBC is making a new documentary about him. He’s spent the last 18 months in a sea of fax paper and photocopies, sorting his prints and drawings into relevant piles and correcting the proofs of several new books.
His view about what makes the best photographers sounds deceptively simple. “There are as many photographers as there are owners of cameras,” he says, “just as any sensitive human being is potentially an artist. But if you have a gift, it’s your obligation to pursue it. You have to live, you have to read, and you have to look. So few people really look – I mean search with their eyes. They identify,” he imitates a rapid, page-turning motion. “Quick! Quick! Like this. You see? But looking is questioning, searching. Questioning the relationship of one thing to another and enjoying. It needs concentration. And it needs time. It was Rodin who said, ‘What is done with time, time will respect it.'”
He frequently uses quotations in his conversation, mostly from memory, sometimes written down, a sign of the way his philosophical and aesthetic ideas have been developed in relationship to others’, particularly the Surrealists in his youth and, later, Hinduism and Buddhism.
His most famous definition he wrote 45 years ago in the introduction to his book of photographs, Images la Sauvette (Pictures on the Run), published in the United States as The Decisive Moment.
“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 organisation of forms which give that event its proper expression. I believe that, through the art of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us, which can mould us. A balance must be established between these two worlds, the one inside us and the one outside us. As the result of a constant reciprocal process, both these worlds come to form a single one. And it is this world that we must communicate.”
The decisive moment wasn’t his own phrase, but one he borrowed from Cardinal de Retz, a 17th-century French priest, but it was quickly attached to Cartier-Bresson as his personal credo, and it stuck. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, “the decisive moment” was pursued like a grail by photographers for whom Cartier-Bresson was a god. He still tries to correct people who attribute it to him – though despairingly now, as it’s obviously too late, and it does, after all, encapsulate something of what he meant.
One of the qualities – not necessarily advantages – of living for a long time must be that you see the cultural shifts a society makes as it evolves, how its value systems change, how the balance of society alters. Cartier-Bresson was born in 1908, when women were still in bustle skirts and the first Renaults and Peugeots and Citrons would have been pottering down the Rue de Rivoli. Today, as he walks past the girls in skinny pants and foot-high trainers, past the windows crammed with tiny Eiffel Towers and plaster Arcs de Triomphe, and threads swiftly and perilously through a maze of bumpers, I think he must be able to remember the Rue de Rivoli before it was one long exhaust pipe.
He seems totally adjusted to – if not totally approving of – the society he has found himself in. “Nostalgia is not a healthy attitude,” he says firmly. He is much keener to talk about science, about the dangers of genetic engineering and pollution. “Man is committing suicide,” he says angrily. We are becoming “a race formed by sorcerers’ apprentices”. But he is grateful for medical expertise and fascinated by the possibilities opened up by quantum mathematics.
Cartier-Bresson was born into a family of wealthy textile manufacturers in Chanteloup, about 32km east of Paris. His mother’s side of the family was from Normandy, and numbered among their ancestors Charlotte Corday, famous for murdering the French revolutionary Marat in his bath.
His father’s side of the family was artistic. The family were left-wing Catholics who practised the kind of 19th- century paternalism that built hospitals and churches, and must have bred a basic humanism in him early on. Though he rebelled, in the sense that he refused to go into the family business, his desire to become a full-time painter couldn’t have been completely unacceptable either.
After he left school – the same school Marcel Proust and Andr Malraux had attended – his father gave him a small allowance, which meant he could take painting lessons in Paris and spend a year studying at Cambridge. But he says it wasn’t such an enormous sum – he had to give up cigarettes if he wanted to take a girl out.
While studying in Paris, Cartier-Bresson would go regularly to the cafe where the Surrealists held their meetings, and sit at the bottom of the table, “too timid and too young to speak up”. He says he was formed by Surrealism and communism, the two leading movements of his youth, and it was the Surrealists’ belief in the power of the unconscious, in opening up the mind to chance, which would later inform his ideas about photography and extend into his openness to life.
His most enduring memory of Cambridge is being invited to tea by Sir James Frazer, after which he read his way through most of The Golden Bough. “From then on, I realised that there were other forms of society than the Judeo-Christian one, and this marked me forever.”
When, in 1930, he left France for Africa after completing his national service, he was influenced by Frazer, but he was also following in the footsteps of the writers and poets he most admired: Arthur Rimbaud, Louis Ferdinand Cline, Joseph Conrad, and the Surrealist critic Michel Leiris.
He lived for a year on the Ivory Coast, where he worked as a hunter supplying villages with meat, until a bout of blackwater fever cut short his plans. “When I returned home I was still very sick, and I went to the south of France and started using the camera. I was exhausted. I was just walking, and I discovered the joy of shooting. Just like when I was hunting.”
He had owned a camera as a child, and had taken pictures in Africa, though the film had been damaged. But the first photograph to really inspire him – “The one where I said, ‘Oh, you can do that with a camera?'” – was a 1929 picture by the Hungarian photographer Martin Munkacsi of three boys in silhouette running into the surf of Lake Tanganyika. “And from then on, I said, ‘That’s it. Let’s go and see what’s going on outside.’ I was just recording what I saw.”
He took a car and drove across southern France and into Spain and Italy. In 1932 and 1933, before leaving Europe for Mexico, he took what are still some of his greatest photographs. The villages of the southern Mediterranean, where the afternoon sun threw long, angular shadows across the streets and reduced the occasional figure to a silhouette, afforded the same mass and line that paint or charcoal might achieve.
By the time he returned to Paris in 1936, he had decided to give up photography and become a film director. He was turned down by both GW Pabst and Luis Buuel, before Jean Renoir took him on as an assistant.
With Renoir he worked on a propaganda film for the French Communist Party, followed by Une Partie de Campagne, in which, since Renoir liked to give his assistants a taste of what it felt like on the other side of the camera, he found himself playing a young seminarian, and later an English butler in La Rgle du Jeu. Renoir quickly realised, however, that Cartier-Bresson wasn’t cut out to be a director of feature films, and was better suited to documentaries. In 1937, Cartier-Bresson made his first film in Spain, about a Republican hospital during the civil war.
Since the early 1930s, Cartier-Bresson had been drawn more closely into political circles, and in 1933 he formed two friendships that were to alter the course of his life. At a meeting of left-wing writers and artists in Paris, he found himself sitting next to a young Polish photographer called David Szymin. They became friends, and a few months later, Szymin – “Chim” as he was nicknamed – introduced Cartier-Bresson to his other photographer friend, an emigr Hungarian called Andr Friedmann, who would soon become better known as Robert Capa. Chim and Capa were preparing to cover the civil war in Spain, and by 1938, Capa was being bylined as “the greatest war photographer in the world”.
When World War II broke out, Cartier- Bresson was drafted almost immediately. He was captured by the Germans in June 1940, and sent to a camp. After two failed attempts, he managed to escape and began making his way back to Paris. “I was hiding in a farm with several others, Jews and escaped prisoners, and I stayed there for two or three months until, finally, I came back to Paris and worked for the underground.
“After liberation, I went back to the farm and discovered that one of the people in the group was a stool-pigeon, and everybody, including the farmer, but not the farmer’s wife, had ended up in Buchenwald.”
Back in Paris, working for the underground, helping escaped prisoners-of-war, he also took portraits of French artists. In the 50 years since they were taken, some of these pictures have become the best-known images of some of the great artists of the century: Henri Matisse in bed; Pierre Bonnard, hunched against the cold; Albert Camus, collar turned up, cigarette dangling la Bogart, a picture that would fix his identity for eternity; and Georges Braque.
For Cartier-Bresson, the war was a turning point. “I couldn’t go back to painting and drawing. After everything that had gone on in the war, I didn’t feel like going back to an easel. The camera was there to record the world, and I went back to photography because of my curiosity about what was going on.
“Reportage for me means sniffing around the world. You don’t pass judgment. You just say: ‘I felt this,’ ‘I’ve seen that.’ It’s always subjective. It’s related to who you are. There’s no such thing as objectivity. Just like there’s no truth. It’s always in relation to something.”
The first thing he did after liberation was make a documentary about the return of French refugees and deportees from Germany, and, while making it, he took one of his most famous photographs, the denunciation of a female Gestapo informer at a camp in Dessau. It is a picture of two women whose roles have suddenly been reversed, and in their expressions, you can read all the hatred of the preceding five years.
The war had brought the United States and Europe closer together, but, in Cartier- Bresson’s case, not quite close enough. In 1946 he sailed for New York, where the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) was preparing a posthumous exhibition of his photographs. They believed he had been killed in the war, and he thought he should be there. He was still in the US when he got the news that he had become a founder member of Magnum.
But if he had doubts about the wisdom of joining Magnum in the beginning, Capa soon put him straight. In a letter, Cartier- Bresson wrote: “At the time of my exhibition at Moma in 1946, Robert Capa warned me: ‘Watch out for labels. They are reassuring. But people will attach one to you that you will not be able to remove, that of the little Surrealist photographer. You will be lost, you will become precious and mannered. Continue in the way you are going, but with the label of photo- journalist, and keep the rest in your heart of hearts. This will place you directly in touch with what is happening in the world.'”
Capa divided the world into four parts, and Cartier-Bresson’s “beat” was the Far East. By the summer of 1948, he was eager to get to India for independence. He was married to Javanese poet and dancer, Ratna Mohini, and they travelled together, arriving too late for the celebrations. But Cartier- Bresson was invited to meet Mahatma Gandhi. Less than an hour later, Gandhi was assassinated. Cartier-Bresson’s photographs of his funeral were published in Life under the Magnum credit.
Between 1948 and 1951, he lived in Asia, returning to Paris to work with Triade, the Greek-born art director and publisher, on Images la Sauvette, published in 1952 in France and the US with a cover illustration by Matisse. Les Europens, with a cover by Joan Mir, followed three years later.
In the next two decades, Cartier-Bresson lived between Asia, Europe and America. He was in China for the 10th anniversary of the revolution, and in the US to photograph Marilyn Monroe on the set of The Misfits. He went to Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Mexico, Cuba and the Soviet Union
In 1966, he stepped down as a full member of Magnum, though the agency continued to distribute his pictures and he maintained a guiding role.
After all these years of photography, he is fascinated by the question of time, how it is measured, defined and controlled it. “The notion of time is something beautiful,” he says. “For me, time is only the present second. Only that exists. The rest has gone, and will come eventually.”
He reads a dedication he has written and suggested I copy it down. It is a flick of the wrist in the direction of fame, and not without self-irony.
“Here are 180 photos, 1932 to 1974, taken at one-25th of a second, which makes, then – how to compute? – 180 x one-25th (7,2 seconds). This was done in 41 years. Now let’s subtract that number of seconds from the number of seconds in 41 years. How many will still be available? Then let’s calculate how many seconds there are in a light year, just to know where we stand. Hurrah for eternity at one-25th of a second!”