Photographer Found Timeless Art in Everyday Life

Henri Cartier-Bresson, the Frenchman who raised photojournalism to an art form with the use of a small hand-held camera and a vision that photography should capture what he called “the decisive moment,” has died. He was 95.

Cartier-Bresson died Tuesday at his home in Provence, according to his family, who provided no details on the cause of death. He was buried Wednesday.

“With him, France loses a genius photographer, a true master, and one of the most gifted artists of his generation and most respected in the world. An essential witness of his time, he photographed the 20th century with passion, immortalizing with his universal vision the movement of men and civilizations,” French President Jacques Chirac said in a statement.

“Henri Cartier-Bresson was a giant,” said Robert Sobieszek, chief curator of photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “He did for photography what Picasso did for painting. He invented a form that we now call street photography. Without him, it wouldn’t exist. He changed the way we see photographs.”

From his earliest days as a working photographer, Cartier-Bresson traveled the world on assignment for European and American magazines, including Look, Life and Paris Match. He had a knack for being in the right part of the world just as history was unfolding. He said his intention was to “trap” life and preserve it in the act of being lived.

To achieve this he relied on a simple Leica camera as his main tool. In India, Cartier-Bresson photographed Mohandas K. Gandhi an hour before his assassination, and he stayed to cover the funeral. In 1954, he was among the first Western photographers to record Soviet society after the death of dictator Josef Stalin and the end of his brutal rule.

“Of all forms of expression,” Cartier-Bresson noted in his book “The Decisive Moment” (1952), “photography is the only one which seizes the instant in its flight. We look for the evanescent, the irreplaceable; that is our constant concern.”

He also wrote, “To take photographs is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeting reality. It is at that moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”

And few did it as well as Cartier-Bresson.

“To capture the decisive moment, the nanosecond when things coalesce for the perfect image, is an art. It is a talent that very few people have,” Sobieszek said. “You have to anticipate, and push the button a fraction of a second before it happens. You have to photograph the future.”

During his decades-long career as a working photographer, Cartier-Bresson repeatedly crossed the divide between art and photojournalism. From 1947, when he and colleagues Robert Capa, George Rodger, William Vandivert and David Seymour, known as “Chim,” founded the Magnum agency for photojournalists, he helped raise the status of the profession. Magnum quickly earned a reputation as an elite operation whose members ranked among the most talented in the business.

But even as he helped build photojournalism, Cartier-Bresson insisted that he was first of all an artist. His work was exhibited in museums from Madrid to Mexico City. One of his first shows was a joint exhibition with the great Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez-Bravo in Mexico City in 1934.

The same year that he helped found Magnum, Cartier-Bresson attended the opening of his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Seven years later, in 1954, curators at the Louvre in Paris broke precedent and gave him the museum’s first exhibition by a single living photographer.

He was the author of numerous books, and his works were published in “Henri Cartier-Bresson: Photographer” (1979), edited by Robert Delpire.

He never felt quite comfortable with his dual identity as an art photographer and photojournalist.

“I am not a journalist,” he said in 1975. “I simply sniff around and take the temperature of a place.” In Spain, France, Mexico, China and the American South, he took photographs of flea markets, ghettos, city centers and the people who roamed them.

Often the comic and surreal aspects of daily life caught his attention: grandfathers dressed in spats and bowler hats, streetwalkers whose breasts were pouring out of their tight bodices, businessmen in identical tweed caps, ghetto children playing naked in the street.

“I prowled the streets all day,” he wrote of his way of working. “I craved to seize the whole essence of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.”

“He had a sense of bemusement about the human condition,” Arthur Ollman, director of the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, said in an interview with The Times. “He left us a catalog of human foibles and oddities, in a world that is a benign place.”

The spontaneous look of his images sprang from a carefully planned geometric composition. Geometry gave form to his photographs the way grammar disciplines creative writing. He eschewed gimmickry in photography, worked exclusively in black and white and declared himself allergic to flash photographs. He was also not interested in printing. Once he made a photograph, he never cropped it or allowed editors to do so.

“If it needs to be cropped,” he once said, “I know that it’s bad and that nothing could possibly improve it. The only improvement would have been to have taken another picture, at the right place and the right time.”

His most memorable photographs include “Rue Mouffetard,” the well-known shot of a grinning youngster carrying two bottles of wine down a Paris street, and “Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare,” which shows a man frozen in midair as he leaps over a puddle. He made memorable portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, writer William Faulkner and artist Henri Matisse.

“Cartier-Bresson was very different from the traditional photojournalist,” said Peter Galassi, director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art and curator of its 1987 photography exhibit “Cartier-Bresson the Early Work.” “The subject of his photographs wasn’t in itself necessarily important, but it alluded to the spirit of a place, or a moment.”

That was never more apparent than in 1948 at Gandhi’s funeral. Few of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs covered the actual event. He looked past the funeral bier and the dignitaries to the ordinary people in the crowd, their faces wrung out in confusion and fear. One famous image shows the teeming crowd with a number of mourners clinging to the branches of a tree, taking in the scene from above.

His early life suggested that Cartier-Bresson was not destined to follow the predictable path. Born Aug. 22, 1908, into a family of wealth and title in the city of Chanteloup near Paris, he was the oldest of five children and the least likely to carry on the family textile business. Henri was more interested in accompanying his mother, Marthe, to concerts and poetry readings.

She tried to instill her Catholic faith in him as well, but he could not abide religious institutions. Later in life he embraced Buddhism, which values the present moment as the only reality.

At 16, Cartier-Bresson made friends with the French Surrealist poet Andre Breton and painter Max Ernst. He attended the meetings where they explored their ideas about the unconscious mind and automatic reflexes as essential tools for an artist.

“I was too young to belong,” Cartier-Bresson said of the group. “I sat at the end of the table and did not speak.” More than any pronouncements about how to make art, he was impressed by the Surrealists’ attitude that an artist must revolt against tradition.

At 19, the year he graduated from high school, Cartier-Bresson studied drawing and painting with Andre Lhote, a lesser-known Cubist painter who taught him to build a strong, geometric composition, invaluable for his future work. “It was vital training for the eye,” Cartier-Bresson said of his lessons. But with typical candor he added, “Lhote had no imagination.”

Cartier-Bresson went to Cambridge University, where he studied literature but dropped out after one year. An adventurer with a restless soul, he traveled in 1930 to France’s African colony of Ivory Coast with a plan to support himself as a big-game hunter. Several months after he arrived, he developed blackwater fever.

In a letter to his grandfather in France, he said he was dying and asked to be buried in Normandy, to the music of Claude Debussy. His grandfather’s response gives some idea of the family patriarch’s sense of humor.

“Your grandfather finds that too expensive,” an uncle wrote of the funeral plans. “It would be preferable that you return, first.”

He did return home and later said Africa had changed him.

To observe the treatment of Africans under colonial rule obliged him, he said, “to testify with a quicker instrument than a [paint-] brush to the scars of the world.”

He bought his first Leica in Marseille, where he went to recover from his illness in 1932. He was 24 years old. From then on he wore a camera over his shoulder and referred to it as the extension of his eye.

Travel became more essential to his work, and his knack for ferreting out the famous or soon-to-be-famous artists of his time did not fail him as he toured the world. He became friends with African American poet Langston Hughes and with Alvarez-Bravo.

By 1936 Cartier-Bresson was back in Paris, curious to learn about moving pictures, and so arranged an interview with Jean Renoir, already considered a genius among French filmmakers. Renoir gave him a job as an assistant director.

In the months that followed, Cartier-Bresson worked with Renoir on two of Renoir’s best-known films, “A Day in the Country” and “The Rules of the Game,” in which Cartier-Bresson had a cameo role. Renoir’s gentle affection for human nature, apparent in his films, became more pronounced in Cartier-Bresson’s photographs as well.

About that time, Cartier-Bresson married Ratna Mohini, a Javanese poet and dancer. The marriage would end in divorce 30 years later. He gave up the erratic movie industry for a job as a photographer for Ce Soir, the French Communist daily. He also worked with Alliance, a photographers agency whose members included Chim and Capa.

In 1939, at the onset of World War II, Cartier-Bresson entered the French army as a member of the film and photography unit. Within months he was captured by Germans. He spent 35 months in prison camps, and friends and colleagues presumed that he was dead. The first exhibit of his work planned by MOMA in New York was to be held posthumously.

While he was in German hands, he taunted the guards continually, he told Vanity Fair magazine last year, “I was a very poor laborer. I would sabotage by doing things very, very slowly ... the least work possible. We would tell the Germans we can’t work without red wine.”

Cartier-Bresson successfully escaped prison camp on his third attempt. He hid in farmhouses in Touraine until French Resistance fighters could provide the false papers that allowed him to return home. On arriving in Paris, he joined the Resistance and organized its photographic unit to document the German occupation of France, the Allied invasion and the final Nazi retreat.

In 1945 he made a documentary commissioned by the U.S. government. “The Return” follows the homecoming of French war prisoners and deportees. But after the war he gave up filmmaking. “I’m glad I left the cinema,” he said in an interview of 1987. “There were always money problems, even for Renoir.”

He spent most of 1947 in New York, living in Harlem and the Chelsea district, taking photographs and studying filmmaking with Paul Strand, who was, like Cartier-Bresson, best known as a still photographer.

From the mid-1970s, when more art historians and museum curators began to take photography seriously as an art form, Cartier-Bresson stood out among the masters of his age. He was compared to the earlier French photographer Eugene Atget, whose street scenes of Paris at the turn of the century combined intimacy with a strong geometric composition.

Cartier-Bresson was also linked to his near-contemporary Andre Kertesz, who arrived in Paris from Hungary in the mid-1920s and prowled the city’s neighborhoods, planning out careful compositions that froze the action of ordinary life. Cartier-Bresson once said the first photograph that truly overwhelmed him -- in which three black African children are running toward the waves -- was taken by another Hungarian, Martin Munkacsi.

Photojournalists who followed Cartier-Bresson’s lead developed a spontaneity in their style as well as a taste for the unpredictable that paid tribute to the master’s work.

Russell Miller, in his book “Magnum, Fifty Years at the Front Line of History,” says Cartier-Bresson inspired generations of photojournalists and dominated the photographic pantheon but remained unique for his perspective.

“The great photographers of the 35-millimeter camera came after him: Robert Frank, Gary Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Gilles Peress,” Sobieszek said. “They all documented street scenes, using Leicas, and they all knew about the decisive moment.”

Cartier-Bresson grew weary of photography in the early 1970s and returned to his first love: drawing and painting. He took few photographs after 1973 and allowed few photographers to take his picture.

He married photographer Martine Franck, once a member of Magnum, in 1970. They had one daughter, Melanie, and she had one child, a daughter, Natasha.

Young admirers who visited Cartier-Bresson in his apartment overlooking the Tuileries Gardens and the Louvre did not find the gentle humanist they expected. There were no photographs on his walls and, as he was much of his life, he remained a curmudgeon.

Ollman first met Cartier-Bresson when he took his photographs to show in the 1970s, hoping for advice. None was offered. Instead, Cartier-Bresson, who loved to incite discussion, gave his opinion of the Grand Canyon, a favorite subject for nature photographers. “It looks like an animal’s entrails,” he said.

At 94 he, his wife and daughter opened the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris to house and display his work and the work of other photographers. The opening was accompanied by a retrospective exhibition at the French National Library that opened in April 2003.

“I don’t like to be passive but rather to be alive and reacting,” he said in an interview with Aperture magazine in the summer 2003 issue. “Life is continually a surprise.”