AT A GLANCE
- Known for
- The decisive moment, street photography, co-founding Magnum Photos
- Worked in
- Black and white
- Camera
- Leica rangefinder with a 50mm lens
- Also
- Painting, drawing and documentary film
- Start with
- The Decisive Moment (Steidl, 2014)
- Links
Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) was a French photographer and one of the founders of Magnum Photos. With a small Leica, he photographed life on the street and great moments of history, from India and China to the Soviet Union. His book The Decisive Moment gave many photographers a name for what they look for.
The story
In 1932 there was building work behind the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. A plank fence stood around it, and the square was under water. Henri Cartier-Bresson pushed his small Leica into a gap between the planks. At that moment a man jumped across the flooded ground. “The space between the planks was not entirely wide enough for my lens, which is the reason the picture is cut off on the left,” he explained.
The camera was still new to him. From 1926 he had studied painting with André Lhote in Paris. In 1930 he spent almost a year in the Ivory Coast. Back home, a photograph by Martin Munkácsi in a magazine made him decide to take up photography, and soon he bought his first Leica. “It became the extension of my eye, and I have never been separated from it since I found it,” he wrote.
With it he travelled across Europe. “I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce,” he remembered. In 1933 the Julien Levy Gallery in New York gave him his first exhibition.
Then the war came. In 1940 he was in a film and photography unit of the French army, and on 23 June the Germans took him prisoner. Only on his third attempt, in February 1943, did he escape. Meanwhile, the Museum of Modern Art in New York thought he had disappeared and began to plan a “posthumous” exhibition. In 1946 he sailed to New York with more than 300 prints and pasted them into a large album. The show opened in February 1947. That same year he founded Magnum Photos with Robert Capa, David Seymour, George Rodger and William Vandivert.
In November 1948 Life sent him to Beijing for two weeks. He stayed in China for ten months.
His first book, Images à la Sauvette, came out in 1952 with a cover by Henri Matisse. In English it was called The Decisive Moment. In 1974 he ended his active work with Magnum and went back to drawing.
The young man at the fence had only a narrow gap to look through. For him, the camera was never the point. It was “a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.” And taking a picture meant one thing: “It is putting one’s head, one’s eye, and one’s heart on the same axis.”
The work
- 1908Born on 22 August in Chanteloup, east of Paris
- 1926Studies painting with André Lhote
- 1932Photographs a man jumping behind the Gare Saint-Lazare
- 1933First exhibition, at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York
- 1940Taken prisoner by the German army; escapes in 1943
- 1947MoMA exhibition in New York; co-founds Magnum Photos
- 1952Publishes Images à la Sauvette (The Decisive Moment)
- 1974Leaves active work with Magnum to focus on drawing
- 2004Dies on 3 August in Montjustin, Provence
Lessons
Use a camera you can forget. A small Leica let him move freely and work fast. He called it the extension of his eye.
See the frame first. His training as a painter taught him composition. Look for strong lines and shapes, then wait for life to fill them.
Be ready all day. He walked the streets for hours, ready to react in a fraction of a second.
Try this: find a place with strong shapes, like stairs, a wall or a puddle. Stay there with one lens and wait for a person to step into the frame.
Gear
Leica rangefinder: he bought his first Leica in 1931 or 1932 and used Leica cameras for the rest of his career.
50mm lens: his normal lens. He saw the world through one focal length.
Black-and-white film: almost all of his best-known work is in black and white, made without flash.
He did not care much about equipment. What mattered to him was the moment, not the machine.
Books
The Decisive Moment (Steidl, 2014). A facsimile of his famous first book, published in Paris in 1952 as Images à la Sauvette and in New York as The Decisive Moment. It copies the original design, sequence and large page size, and keeps the collage cover by Henri Matisse. It holds 160 pages of his early work and his preface about how he works. A separate booklet by Centre Pompidou curator Clément Chéroux tells the history of the book. It is the best place to start, and a key book for anyone who loves street photography.
Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century (The Museum of Modern Art, 2010). By Peter Galassi, then chief curator of photography at MoMA, for the big retrospective of about 300 photographs in 2010. The 376 pages follow his whole career: the early 1930s work, and the great postwar stories from India, Indonesia, China, the Soviet Union, the United States and Europe. It also shows how his pictures were used in magazines and books. A good, thorough overview for readers who want more than the famous images.
Scrapbook: Photographs 1932–1946 (Steidl, 2006; Thames & Hudson in the UK). In 1946 he took about 300 prints to New York and pasted them into a large album for his first MoMA exhibition. This book publishes that album in full for the first time, with many pictures that were unknown before. Texts are by Agnès Sire, Michel Frizot and Martine Franck. It is a close look at his early years, from the first Leica pictures to the end of the war.
The Mind's Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers (Aperture, 1999). A small book that gathers his own writing from about 45 years, some of it in English for the first time. It includes his famous essay on the decisive moment, notes from his travels in China, Cuba and Russia, and short texts about friends such as Robert Capa, David Seymour and André Kertész. For photographers who want to hear his ideas in his own words.
In his words
“To take a photograph is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge in a face of fleeing reality. It is at that moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”
