"To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy"
- Henri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Breson was a french photographer, born 1908. He is considered to be the father of modern photojournalism. He has been one of the most dominant figures in photography, not only because of the unique quality of his work but also because of his tremendous influence on the medium. He studied painting at private art school and the Lhote Academy, his teachers were André Lhote, Cubist painter and sculptor, and society portraitist Jacques Émile Blanche. He began to do photography seriously in 1931.
In a rapidly changing world, Cartier-Bresson was a kind of salvage ethnographer, recording life as it was dissolved by modernity. There was an anthropological rigour to his ascetic gaze and an implicit politics to his social consciousness. Cartier-Breson uses the most basic equipment and never resorts to the contrivance of unusual viewpoints or exaggerated perspectives. He insists that his pictures are not cropped and is at pains to preserve his anonymity. Yet in spite of, or may be because of, this his pictures are immediately identifiable as Cartier-Bressons.
A 'fellow traveller’ in the thirties, images of Cartier-Breson lent a dignity to the quotidian. He had a talent for skewering wealth, pretension, and duplicity was utterly impersonal, it knew no borders. Most of his pictures are taken on the 50mm lens of his Leica. The impact and visual quality of his photographs rest on his unerring ability to be able to select the precise moment at which the individual elements of an image fleetingly combine to create the most telling effect. The phrase that Cartier-Breson coined to explain his own approach, ‘the decisive moment’, has become a watchword for many thousands of photographers. There are essentially two types of photographer, one who pre visualizes a photograph and strives to create it, and one who prefers to discovers pictures by chance. Henri Cartier-Bresson is the master of the latter.
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| On the Rhine, Germany, 1956 |
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| Boris Karloff |
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| Boy Helps Amputee Friend Injured in War in Naples, Italy, 1944 |
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| Coco Chanel in Paris, 1964 |
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| Edith Piaf, 1946 |
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| Paris, 1953 |
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| Coney Island, New York, 1946 |
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| Japan, Nakatsu, 1965 |
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| Mahathma Gandhi in his final hour |
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| Marilyn Monroe, 1961 |
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| Marilyn Monroe, Nevada, US, 1960 |
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| Martin Luther King, 1961 |
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| Painting the Eiffel Tower, 1953 |
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| Paris, 1955 |
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| Paris, 1955 |
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| Queen Charlotte's Ball, London, 1959 |
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| Woman with Umbrella |
The woman with an umbrella image is by Richard Avedon, not Cartier-Bresson.
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