Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century

An exhibit of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s moving and poetic photographs  can be enjoyed at the Art Institute of Chicago through Oct. 3. It then  travels to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Henri Cartier-Bresson—the Modern Century  is the first full retrospective of his work  in three decades. Organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York,  the exhibition shows the “rich interplay between Cartier-Bresson the artist, gifted at capturing the flux of life, and Cartier-Bresson the photojournalist whose lens shaped our understanding of seismic political and cultural changes across the second half of the 20th century.”

Photo credit:
Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
San Fermines, Pamplona, Spain. 1952
Gelatin silver print, 11 7/8 x 8 1/4" (30.1 x 21 cm)
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris
©2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris

This exhibition offers 300 images.  "It includes both his formally groundbreaking early images and his historically significant postwar work—in India and Indonesia during struggles for independence, in China during the revolution, in the Soviet Union following Stalin’s death—that redefined the field of photojournalism. Other sections present the themes that preoccupied Cartier-Bresson throughout his career: portraiture, the persistence of ancient customs and patterns of life, the transformation of these patterns by modern industry and commerce, the poetry of human encounters on the street, and the psychology of the crowd," according to the exhibit.

Recently, David Travis, former chair of the Department of Photography, Art Institute of Chicago, offered his thoughts about his friend and colleague for the @ your library website.  Travis organized and presented more than 150 exhibitions of photography at the Art Institute during his 36-year tenure, including exhibitions of the work of Walker Evans, André Kertész, Edward Weston, Paul Strand, and Brassaï. He is perhaps best known for his landmark exhibitions On the Art of Fixing a Shadow, an exhibition of more than 400 photographs, and Starting with Atget: Photographs from the Julien Levy Collection.

Travis has also guest curated  exhibitions for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  For his special contributions to the advancement of awareness and understanding of French
culture, he was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1987. He has also been a guest scholar at the J. Paul Getty Museum; and in 2002 he was named a “Chicagoan of the Year” by Chicago Magazine. At the Edge of the Light: Thoughts on Photographers and Photography, on Talent and Genius, a collection of his lectures and essays, was published in 2003.

MG: Tell us about your relationship with Cartier-Bresson.

DT: I never worked with Henri on an exhibition. He had the reputation of being an independent thinker and few curatorial ideas or historical reviews would have pleased him. When Peter Galassi, the Director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, succeeded in working with him on an exhibition of his early work, I was amazed and asked Peter how he did it. He said, “I never asked him a question for which the answer could have been ‘no.’

I visited Henri many times over three decades and was pleased to have memorable dinners in his home often accompanied by my best friend in Paris, Anne Cartier-Bresson, his niece. He was generous with his feelings and ideas about Andre Kertész when I was doing that research. But we did not talk constantly about photography. He really didn’t like to spoil a good conversation by recounting what was well known about his past. He wanted to know what your thoughts were, sometimes about his favorite pleasures or at other times about his pet peeves. He would often say something bold and assertive for the sake of getting a good conversation going. His mind was as agile as his eye and even in his later years his eyes had a certain intelligent and impish twinkle to them that made you realize that there was something as enchanting and inexplicable about them as there is about his photographs.

MG: Tell us why he is so admired, respected.

DT: Most photographers tend to think of Henri’s legacy as having to do with the phrase 'decisive moment.' There is some truth to that. This technique that he inherited from photographers like Kertész and Martin Muncasci allowed a journalist to roam and explore almost any kind of changing situation in any location on earth. With this technique they could find that if a flowing drama of a scene was held in the suspension of a split-second exposure it became a kind of marvel of its own rather than being just a good optical replication of the objects or characters in view. But had Henri only master that reflex he might have become just another decent assignment photographer. For me his legacy is that these magical photographic skills were part of a humanistic and sympathetic view of how life is lived not in a grand exalted way, but rather as something common and incidental, something that we all share and that is not dulled, but instead enlivened, by his analytic and somewhat distant eye.

MG: Why did Cartier-Bresson turn from painting to photography in his early career?

DT: From childhood, Henri had a passion for photography, using a Kodak Brownie camera as many children did. Within his family his uncle was an ardent painter and his businessman father enjoyed drawing as a pastime, so both of these visual avenues of expression had personal origins for him and became passions as he grew. Late in life, when asked in an interview with (broadcaster) Charlie Rose why he gave up photography to resume drawing, Henri said he had never given up drawing, as he considered the camera a way of making sketches. What he found out, of course, was the camera made instantaneous sketches and recorded events and momentary coincidences at the speed of sight, well beyond the capacity of the hand to draw.

“Geometry and good clean fun”

DT: Once during cocktails before dinner in his apartment on the rue de Rivoli, he responded to something I had written about his photography as it related to the way creative thoughts came to mathematicians. Not sure of what he thought about my piece, and knowing he would express his unvarnished opinion, I was relieved when he said “Yes, you are right, I agree completely. My early career was nothing but geometry and good clean fun.” Those were not my words, but they were perfect. By this he meant that his painting classes with the Synthetic Cubist painter André Lhote instilled in him a visual, geometric order for perception and his occasional presence at the café meetings in Paris, headed by the poet André Breton, the leader of the Surrealist movement, helped to sate his enormous literary appetite. After a period of wanderlust and hunting in Africa as a young man, theses artistic pursuits came together for him in photography. Although he could be profound in speaking about what photographic images were, he still saw them as balancing non-photographic characteristics with what the medium did technically. Thus, we are apt to see a greater distinction than he did between a picture taken by a camera and one created by hand.

MG: How did the photographer Robert Capa influence him to get involved with photojournalism?

 DT: Henri loved Robert Capa and probably saw in him the daring, even reckless, adventurer of whom he could only have dreamed of becoming himself. Both of them published photographs in Regards, a far-leftist magazine. Capa had changed his name Germanic and Jewish sounding name from Endre Friedmann, and Henri’s by-line was Henri Cartier, eliminating the hyphened surname of his haute-bourgeois heritage. Capa’s reports were about the battles and struggles during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Spanish Civil War. Henri’s assignments were closer to home: Parisian jazz clubs, wedding celebrations, camping in the Loire Valley and a delightful photo story on a two-page spread of the 1937 coronation of George VI. The story goes that Capa once told Henri that if he kept on insisting on mentioning photography with Surrealism he would never get any assignments and people would pester him about what he meant by it. Capa told him just announce yourself as a photojournalist and people will drop their curiosity, then you can then go about your own business, whatever it may be.

MG: Why did Cartier-Bresson join the Magnum photo group?

DT: After World War II, having spent most of the time in Nazi labor camps, Henri emerged into another Europe. He had not then decided to become a full-time professional photojournalist. He left Europe and lived in the United States for a period in 1946-47 where he traveled and photographed. He tested himself to see if he could thrive as a photographer in a non-European environment, a new world, so to speak. The standard he set for himself was the work of Walker Evans. After satisfying himself he had what it took to be a photojournalist, he made his decision, and in 1947 with the photojournalists, Robert Capa, David (Chim) Seymour, George Rodger founded the co-operative photo agency Magnum. At the time, other agencies were either large corporations or owned and run by individuals who were not practicing photographers.

“Assignments would be controlled by the photographers…”

DT:  In Magnum the administration and the assignments would be controlled by the photographers themselves. This allowed Henri to work the way he preferred, that is, to travel and inhabit places he would photograph for longer periods of time, rather than making quick in-and-out visits to meet newspaper or magazine deadlines. It permitted him, for the most part, to live outside of Europe in the parts of the world that were changing rapidly in both political and social ways: India, China, and Indonesia. Henri used to joke how it seemed that most of the agency's funds and energies were mainly going toward keeping Capa’s expenses and activities supported. It was an effective and small fraternity of a few like-minded photographers who scattered them around the globe. When both Capa (1954 in Indo-China) and Chim (1956 in the Suez) were killed on assignments in areas of conflict, Henri and Rodger realized that Magnum could no longer survive without expanding the talent pool and administration. After that a larger Magnum was born and began to thrive on a grander scale.

Read part 2 of Mark R.Gould's interview with David Travis to learn more about  the photographers who influenced his work.

Resources

Books

Henri Cartier-Bresson: A Biography. London
Pierre Assouline (2005). Thames & Hudson.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: the Modern Century
Peter Galassi (2010). London: Thames & Hudson.

Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography
Lynne Warren (2006). New York: Routledge.

An Inner Silence : The Portraits of Henri Cartier-Bresson 
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson (2006) London : Thames & Hudson.

Articles

"Tête à Tête: Portraits by Henri Cartier-Bresson"
Washington Post Magazine
Special feature on Tête à Tête exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

"Special Report: Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004)"
The Guardian.
Links to stories about Cartier-Bresson from The Guardian's archive.

"Cartier-Bresson's Impact on Photojournalism"
By Claude Cookman
National Press Photographers Association

"John Berger pays tribute to his good friend"
By John Berger
The Observer, August 2004

Online Exhibitions

Tête à Tête: Portraits by Henri Cartier-Bresson
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Henri Cartier-Bresson Portfolio
Magnum Photos

Henri Cartier-Bresson Portfolio
Photography Now

Also of Interest

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Video interview with Charlie Rose

Resources about Henri Cartier-Bresson on ArtCyclopedia

Henri Cartier-Bresson's biographic sketch at Find A Grave