PARIS: The veteran French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, universally recognized as one of the most influential image-makers of the last century, is honoured this week with an exhibition in Paris and the opening of a foundation to preserve his life’s work.
Born in 1908 to a bourgeois family in a small town east of Paris, Cartier-Bresson took up photography in the 1930s after first studying painting.
After World War II, he co-founded the Magnum photo agency, and his pictures now hang in art galleries all over the world.
The show at the French National Library entitled “De qui s’agit-il?” — Who is it about? — comprises some of his most famous works dating back to 1931, but also drawings, family shots and other mementoes intended to build an impression of his long and extraordinary life.
“We didn’t want to show just his best pictures, but rather the course that he took,” said curator Robert Delpire, who is also director of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation to be inaugurated on Friday at a studio near Montparnasse station.
Among the celebrated images are the moustachioed, bowler-hatted man caught peeping through the canvas surround at a sporting event in Brussels in 1932; a female prisoner denouncing a Gestapo informer in 1945; a boyish Truman Capote in 1947; and children playing on the Berlin Wall in 1962.
But there is also a recent self-portrait in his flat overlooking the capital’s Tuileries gardens, as well as snaps taken with his parents or in captivity in Germany in the war, and a poster from his first exhibition — in New York City an astonishing 70 years ago.
At 94 Cartier-Bresson — who shot only black-and-white film, shunned artificial light and never cropped his pictures — is seen by critics today as one of the generation of photographers responsible for elevating what was till then a hobby or a profession into a fully-fledged art-form.
His personal contribution was to combine the notion of the “Decisive Moment” — the name he gave to a major collection of his work in 1952 — with the meticulous eye for design and proportion that he learned from his studies with painter Andre Lhote in the 1920s.
The “Decisive Moment” — he said in an oft-quoted line — “is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.”—AFP
