Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French artist and humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35mm film.
66 Facts About Henri Cartier-Bresson
2.
Henri Cartier-Bresson pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson's father was a wealthy textile manufacturer, whose Cartier-Bresson thread was a staple of French sewing kits.
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The Henri Cartier-Bresson family lived in a bourgeois neighborhood in Paris, Rue de Lisbonne, near Place de l'Europe and Parc Monceau.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson was raised in traditional French bourgeois fashion, and was required to address his parents with formal vous rather than tu.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson's father assumed that his son would take up the family business, but Henri was strong-willed and feared this prospect.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson attended Ecole Fenelon, a Catholic school that prepared students for the Lycee Condorcet.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson studied painting when he was just 5 years old, taking an apprenticeship in his uncle Louis' studio.
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In 1927, Henri Cartier-Bresson entered a private art school and the Lhote Academy, the Parisian studio of the Cubist painter and sculptor Andre Lhote.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson began socializing with the Surrealists at the Cafe Cyrano, in the Place Blanche.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson 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.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson matured artistically in this stormy cultural and political atmosphere.
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From 1928 to 1929, Henri Cartier-Bresson studied art, literature, and English at the University of Cambridge, where he became bilingual.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson met American expatriate Harry Crosby at Le Bourget, who persuaded the commandant to release Henri Cartier-Bresson into his custody for a few days.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson survived by shooting game and selling it to local villagers.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson 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.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson enhanced his anonymity by painting all shiny parts of the Leica with black paint.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson's photographs were first exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1933, and subsequently at the Ateneo Club in Madrid.
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In 1934, Henri Cartier-Bresson met a young Polish intellectual, a photographer named David Szymin who was called "Chim" because his name was difficult to pronounce.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson traveled to the United States in 1935 with an invitation to exhibit his work at New York's Julien Levy Gallery.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson shared display space with fellow photographers Walker Evans and Manuel Alvarez Bravo.
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When he returned to France, Henri Cartier-Bresson applied for a job with renowned French film director Jean Renoir.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson acted in Renoir's 1936 film Partie de campagne and in the 1939 La Regle du jeu, for which he played a butler and served as second assistant.
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Renoir made Henri Cartier-Bresson act so he could understand how it felt to be on the other side of the camera.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson helped Renoir make a film for the Communist party on the 200 families, including his own, who ran France.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson focused on the new monarch's adoring subjects lining the London streets, and took no pictures of the king.
27.
Between 1937 and 1939, Henri Cartier-Bresson worked as a photographer for the French Communists' evening paper, Ce soir.
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In 1970 Henri Cartier-Bresson married Magnum photographer Martine Franck [25] and in May 1972, the couple had a daughter, Melanie.
29.
When World War II broke out in September 1939, Henri Cartier-Bresson joined the French Army as a Corporal in the Film and Photo unit.
30.
Henri Cartier-Bresson twice tried and failed to escape from the prison camp, and was punished by solitary confinement.
31.
Henri Cartier-Bresson's third escape was successful and he hid on a farm in Touraine before getting false papers that allowed him to travel in France.
32.
Toward the end of the War, rumors had reached America that Henri Cartier-Bresson had been killed.
33.
Henri Cartier-Bresson achieved international recognition for his coverage of Gandhi's funeral in India in 1948 and the last stage of the Chinese Civil War in 1949.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson covered the last six months of the Kuomintang administration and the first six months of the Maoist People's Republic.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed the last surviving Imperial eunuchs in Beijing, as the city was being liberated by the communists.
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In Shanghai, he often worked in the company of photojournalist Sam Tata, whom Henri Cartier-Bresson had previously befriended in Bombay.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson had visited Tiruvannamalai, a town in the Indian State of Tamil Nadu and photographed the last moments of Ramana Maharishi, Sri Ramana Ashram and its surroundings.
38.
In 1952, Henri Cartier-Bresson published his book Images a la sauvette, whose English-language edition was titled The Decisive Moment, although the French language title actually translates as "images on the sly" or "hastily taken images", Images a la sauvette included a portfolio of 126 of his photos from the East and the West.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson held his first exhibition in France at the Pavillon de Marsan in 1955.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson's photography took him to many places, including China, Mexico, Canada, the United States, India, Japan, Portugal and the Soviet Union.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson became the first Western photographer to photograph "freely" in the post-war Soviet Union.
42.
Henri Cartier-Bresson withdrew as a principal of Magnum in 1966 to concentrate on portraiture and landscapes.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson admitted that perhaps he had said all he could through photography.
44.
Henri Cartier-Bresson married Magnum photographer Martine Franck, thirty years younger than himself, in 1970.
45.
Henri Cartier-Bresson retired from photography in the early 1970s, and by 1975 no longer took pictures other than an occasional private portrait; he said he kept his camera in a safe at his house and rarely took it out.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson returned to drawing, mainly using pencil, pen and ink, and to painting.
47.
Henri Cartier-Bresson held his first exhibition of drawings at the Carlton Gallery in New York in 1975.
48.
Henri Cartier-Bresson died in Cereste on August 3,2004, aged 95.
49.
Henri Cartier-Bresson was buried in the local cemetery nearby in Montjustin and was survived by his wife, Martine Franck, and daughter, Melanie.
50.
Henri Cartier-Bresson spent more than three decades on assignment for Life and other journals.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson did not like to be photographed and treasured his privacy.
52.
Henri Cartier-Bresson believed that what went on beneath the surface was nobody's business but his own.
53.
Henri Cartier-Bresson did recall that he once confided his innermost secrets to a Paris taxi driver, certain that he would never meet the man again.
54.
Henri Cartier-Bresson's photographs were influential in the development of cinema verite film.
55.
Henri Cartier-Bresson often wrapped black tape around the camera's chrome body to make it less conspicuous.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson believed in composing his photographs in the viewfinder, not in the darkroom.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson showcased this belief by having nearly all his photographs printed only at full-frame and completely free of any cropping or other darkroom manipulation.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson insisted that his prints be left uncropped so as to include a few millimeters of the unexposed negative around the image area, resulting in a black frame around the developed picture.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson worked exclusively in black and white, other than a few experiments in color.
60.
Henri Cartier-Bresson disliked developing or making his own prints and showed a considerable lack of interest in the process of photography in general, likening photography with the small camera to an "instant drawing".
61.
Henri Cartier-Bresson started a tradition of testing new camera lenses by taking photographs of ducks in urban parks.
62.
Henri Cartier-Bresson never published the images but referred to them as 'my only superstition' as he considered it a 'baptism' of the lens.
63.
Henri Cartier-Bresson is regarded as one of the art world's most unassuming personalities.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson disliked publicity and exhibited a ferocious shyness since his days of hiding from the Nazis during World War II.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson denied that the term "art" applied to his photographs.
66.
Henri Cartier-Bresson was second assistant director to Jean Renoir in 1936 for La vie est a nous and Une partie de campagne, and in 1939 for La Regle du Jeu.