Sad...One of photography greats....
Cartier-Bresson, Artist Who Used Lens, Dies at 95
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: August 4, 2004
Henri Cartier-Bresson, who used his tiny, hand-held 35-millimeter Leica camera to bear humane witness to many of the 20th century's biggest events, from the Spanish Civil War to the German occupation of France to the partition of India to the Chinese revolution to the French student uprisings of 1968, died on Tuesday at his home in Southwest France. He was 95.
A private funeral was held yesterday, according to a statement from his family and Magnum, the photo agency he helped establish.
Mr. Cartier-Bresson seemed to know everyone and to see everything of importance throughout the middle decades of the last century. Even in his later years, when he more or less abandoned photography to draw, he remained an astonishing live wire who liked to say that his approach to life had been shaped by Buddhism. His wife, the photographer Martine Franck, described him to the Dalai Lama as "a Buddhist in turbulence."
He photographed dozens of luminaries: his pictures of a convalescent Matisse during World War II, of Sartre as a boulevardier and of Mahatma Gandhi minutes before he was killed have become icons of photographic portraiture. But he was also the archetype of the itinerant photojournalist during the heyday of photojournalism immediately after the war, before television became widespread, when millions of people still learned what was happening in the world through the pictures that ran in magazines like Life and Paris-Match.
His photographs, later collected in numerous books, were always considered remarkable for their empathy; Lincoln Kirstein called Mr. Cartier-Bresson "a responsible artist, responsible to his craft and to his society."
It was Mr. Cartier-Bresson's prestige, along with that of Robert Capa, George Rodger and David Seymour, known as Chim, that established Magnum Photos, which they founded in 1947, as the world's premier photo agency. Under its aegis, Mr. Cartier-Bresson went to China, India, Indonesia, Egypt, Cuba, the Soviet Union.
But he was far more than a gifted photojournalist. He combined a Rabelaisian appetite for the world with a clarity of vision and intellectual rigor that linked him to French masters like Poussin. His wit, lyricism and ability to see the geometry of a fleeting image and capture it in the blink of an eye reshaped and created a new standard for the art of photography. If in later years a certain sentimentality crept into some of his pictures, his best photographs, many of them from the 1930's, when he most strongly bore the imprint of Surrealism, are simply among the best works of 20th-century art.
In 1932, he stuck his camera between the slats of a fence near the St.-Lazare railway station in Paris at precisely the right instant and captured a picture of the watery lot behind the station, strewn with debris. A man has propelled himself from a ladder that lies in the water. Photographs of puddle jumpers were clichés then, but Mr. Cartier-Bresson brings to his image layer on layer of fresh and uncanny detail: the figure of a leaping dancer on a pair of posters on a wall behind the man mirrors him and his reflection in the water; the rippling circles made by the ladder echo circular bands of discarded metal debris; another poster, advertising a performer named Railowsky, puns with the railway station and the ladder, which, flat, resembles a railroad track.
Cartier-Bresson, Artist Who Used Lens, Dies at 95
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: August 4, 2004
Henri Cartier-Bresson, who used his tiny, hand-held 35-millimeter Leica camera to bear humane witness to many of the 20th century's biggest events, from the Spanish Civil War to the German occupation of France to the partition of India to the Chinese revolution to the French student uprisings of 1968, died on Tuesday at his home in Southwest France. He was 95.
A private funeral was held yesterday, according to a statement from his family and Magnum, the photo agency he helped establish.
Mr. Cartier-Bresson seemed to know everyone and to see everything of importance throughout the middle decades of the last century. Even in his later years, when he more or less abandoned photography to draw, he remained an astonishing live wire who liked to say that his approach to life had been shaped by Buddhism. His wife, the photographer Martine Franck, described him to the Dalai Lama as "a Buddhist in turbulence."
He photographed dozens of luminaries: his pictures of a convalescent Matisse during World War II, of Sartre as a boulevardier and of Mahatma Gandhi minutes before he was killed have become icons of photographic portraiture. But he was also the archetype of the itinerant photojournalist during the heyday of photojournalism immediately after the war, before television became widespread, when millions of people still learned what was happening in the world through the pictures that ran in magazines like Life and Paris-Match.
His photographs, later collected in numerous books, were always considered remarkable for their empathy; Lincoln Kirstein called Mr. Cartier-Bresson "a responsible artist, responsible to his craft and to his society."
It was Mr. Cartier-Bresson's prestige, along with that of Robert Capa, George Rodger and David Seymour, known as Chim, that established Magnum Photos, which they founded in 1947, as the world's premier photo agency. Under its aegis, Mr. Cartier-Bresson went to China, India, Indonesia, Egypt, Cuba, the Soviet Union.
But he was far more than a gifted photojournalist. He combined a Rabelaisian appetite for the world with a clarity of vision and intellectual rigor that linked him to French masters like Poussin. His wit, lyricism and ability to see the geometry of a fleeting image and capture it in the blink of an eye reshaped and created a new standard for the art of photography. If in later years a certain sentimentality crept into some of his pictures, his best photographs, many of them from the 1930's, when he most strongly bore the imprint of Surrealism, are simply among the best works of 20th-century art.
In 1932, he stuck his camera between the slats of a fence near the St.-Lazare railway station in Paris at precisely the right instant and captured a picture of the watery lot behind the station, strewn with debris. A man has propelled himself from a ladder that lies in the water. Photographs of puddle jumpers were clichés then, but Mr. Cartier-Bresson brings to his image layer on layer of fresh and uncanny detail: the figure of a leaping dancer on a pair of posters on a wall behind the man mirrors him and his reflection in the water; the rippling circles made by the ladder echo circular bands of discarded metal debris; another poster, advertising a performer named Railowsky, puns with the railway station and the ladder, which, flat, resembles a railroad track.
