HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON, HUMANISM & PHOTOGRAPHY

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French humanist photographer, who died on a day like today in 2004.

Henri Cartier-Bresson (22 August 1908-3 August 2004) was a French humanist photographer 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 1970s he took up drawing- he had studied painting in the 1920s.

Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup-en-Brie, Seine-et-Marne, France, 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. His mother was descended from Charlotte Corday.

The Cartier-Bresson family lived in a bourgeois neighborhood in Paris, Rue de Lisbonne, near Place de l'Europe and Parc Monceau. His parents supported him financially so Henri could 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 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 or Mallarmé, and reprimanded him, Let's have no disorder in your studies!. Cartier-Bresson said, 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.

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 1920s, 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 [vague].

More information: Magnum Photos

Cartier-Bresson began socializing 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.

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.

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. Titled Three Boys at 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.

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, would cover Africa and the Middle East. Chim, who spoke a variety of European languages, would work in Europe. Cartier-Bresson would be assigned to India and China. Vandivert, who had also left Life, 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 died in Céreste (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France) on August 3, 2004, aged 95. No cause of death was announced. He was buried in the local cemetery nearby in Montjustin and was survived by his wife, Martine Franck, and daughter, Mélanie.

More información: ICP

 The photograph itself doesn't interest me.
I want only to capture a minute part of reality.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

ROBERT CAPA, THE PHOTOJOURNALISM IN WAR TIMES

Today, The  Grandma has been looking at photos made by one of the best photographs in history, Robert Capa, who is considered the greatest combat and adventure photographer in history, who died on a day like today in 1954.

Robert Capa, born Endre Ernő Friedmann (October 22, 1913-May 25, 1954) was a Hungarian-American war photographer and photojournalist as well as the companion and professional partner of photographer Gerda Taro.

He is considered by some to be the greatest combat and adventure photographer in history.

Capa fled political repression in Hungary when he was a teenager, moving to Berlin, where he enrolled in college. He witnessed the rise of Hitler, which led him to move to Paris, where he met and began to work with Gerta Pohorylle. Together they worked under the alias Robert Capa and became photojournalists. Though she contributed too much of the early work, she quickly created her own alias Gerda Taro, and they began to publish their work separately. He subsequently covered five wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II across Europe, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and the First Indochina War, with his photos published in major magazines and newspapers.

During his career he risked his life numerous times, most dramatically as the only civilian photographer landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day. He documented the course of World War II in London, North Africa, Italy, and the liberation of Paris. His friends and colleagues included Ernest Hemingway, Irwin Shaw, John Steinbeck and director John Huston.

In 1947, for his work recording World War II in pictures, U.S. general Dwight D. Eisenhower awarded Capa the Medal of Freedom. That same year, Capa co-founded Magnum Photos in Paris. The organization was the first cooperative agency for worldwide freelance photographers. Hungary has issued a stamp and a gold coin in his honour.

More information: Magnum Photos

Capa was born Endre Ernő Friedmann to the Jewish family of Júlia and Dezső Friedmann in Budapest, Austria-Hungary on October 22, 1913. His mother, Julianna Henrietta Berkovits was a native of Nagykapos and Dezső Friedmann came from the Transylvanian village of Csucsa. At the age of 18, he was accused of alleged communist sympathies and was forced to flee Hungary.

He moved to Berlin where he enrolled in Berlin University where he worked part-time as a darkroom assistant for income and then became a staff photographer for the German photographic agency, Dephot. It was during that period that the Nazi Party came into power, which made Capa, a Jew, decide to leave Germany and move to Paris.

He became professionally involved with Gerta Pohorylle, later known as Gerda Taro, a German-Jewish photographer who had moved to Paris for the same reasons he did. The two of them decided to work under the alias Capa at this time. The two of them later separated aliases and published their work independently.

Capa and Taro developed a romantic relationship alongside their professional one. 

Capa proposed and Taro refused, but they continued their involvement. He also shared a darkroom with French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, with whom he would later co-found the Magnum Photos cooperative.

Capa's first published photograph was of Leon Trotsky making a speech in Copenhagen on The Meaning of the Russian Revolution in 1932.

From 1936 to 1939, Capa worked in Spain, photographing the Spanish Civil War, along with Gerda Taro, his companion and professional photography partner, and David Seymour.

Taro died when the motor vehicle in which she was travelling, apparently standing on the footboard, collided with an out-of-control tank. She had been returning from a photographic assignment covering the Battle of Brunete.

It was during that war that Capa took the photo now called The Falling Soldier, purporting to show the death of a Republican soldier. The photo was published in magazines in France and then by Life magazine and Picture Post. The authenticity of the photo was later questioned, with evidence including other photos from the scene suggesting it was staged. Picture Post, a pioneering photojournalism magazine published in the United Kingdom, had once described the twenty-five-year-old Capa as the greatest war photographer in the world.

Capa accompanied then journalist and author Ernest Hemingway to photograph the war, which Hemingway would later describe in his novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Life magazine published an article about Hemingway and his time in Spain, along with numerous photos by Capa.

In December 2007, three boxes filled with rolls of film, containing 4,500 35 mm negatives of the Spanish Civil War by Capa, Taro, and Chim (David Seymour), which had been considered lost since 1939, were discovered in Mexico. In 2011, Trisha Ziff directed a film about those images, entitled The Mexican Suitcase.

In 1938, he travelled to the Chinese city of Hankou, now within Wuhan, to document the resistance to the Japanese invasion. He sent his images to Life magazine, which published some of them in its May 23, 1938 issue.

More information: ICP

At the start of World War II, Capa was in New York City, having moved there from Paris to look for work, and to escape Nazi persecution.

On October 7, 1943 Robert Capa was in Naples with Life reporter Will Lang Jr., and there he photographed the Naples post office bombing.

In 1947 Capa travelled to the Soviet Union with his friend, the American writer John Steinbeck. They originally met when they shared a room in an Algiers hotel with other war correspondents before the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943. They reconnected in New York, where Steinbeck told him he was thinking about visiting the Soviet Union, now that the war was over.

In 1947, Capa founded the cooperative venture Magnum Photos in Paris with Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Vandivert, David Seymour, and George Rodger. It was a cooperative agency to manage work for and by freelance photographers, and developed a reputation for the excellence of its photo-journalists.

Capa toured Israel during its founding and while it was being attacked by neighbouring states. He took the numerous photographs that accompanied Irwin Shaw's book, Report on Israel.

In the early 1950s, Capa travelled to Japan for an exhibition associated with Magnum Photos. While there, Life magazine asked him to go on assignment to Southeast Asia, where the French had been fighting for eight years in the First Indochina War. Although he had claimed a few years earlier that he was finished with war, Capa accepted the job. He accompanied a French regiment located in Thái Bình Province with two Time-Life journalists, John Mecklin and Jim Lucas.

On 25 May 1954, the regiment was passing through a dangerous area under fire when Capa decided to leave his jeep and go up the road to photograph the advance. Capa was killed when he stepped on a landmine near the road.

He was 40 at the time of his death. He is buried in plot #189 at Amawalk Hill Cemetery, also called Friends Cemetery, Amawalk, Westchester County, New York along with his mother, Julia, and his brother, Cornell Capa.

More information: The Culture Trip

If your pictures aren't good enough,
you aren't close enough.

Robert Capa