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125-413: Henri Cartier-Bresson ( French: [ɑ̃ʁi kaʁtje bʁɛsɔ̃] ; 22 August 1908 – 3 August 2004) was a French artist and humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography , and an early user of 35mm 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

250-530: A Leica 35 mm rangefinder camera fitted with a normal 50 mm lens, or occasionally a wide-angle lens for landscapes. He often wrapped black tape around the camera's chrome body to make it less conspicuous. With fast black and white film and sharp lenses, he was able to photograph events unnoticed. No longer bound by a 4×5 press camera or a medium format twin-lens reflex camera , miniature-format cameras gave Cartier-Bresson what he called "the velvet hand...the hawk's eye." He never photographed with flash,

375-415: A Surrealist Manifesto . Each claimed to be successors of a revolution launched by Appolinaire. One group, led by Yvan Goll consisted of Pierre Albert-Birot , Paul Dermée , Céline Arnauld , Francis Picabia , Tristan Tzara , Giuseppe Ungaretti , Pierre Reverdy , Marcel Arland , Joseph Delteil , Jean Painlevé and Robert Delaunay , among others. The group led by André Breton claimed that automatism

500-772: A French identity after war, defeat, occupation, and collaboration, and to modernise the country. For photographers the experience had been one in which the Nazi authorities censored all visual expression and the Vichy carefully controlled those who remained; and who eked out a living with portraiture and commercial, officially endorsed editorial photography, though individuals joined the Resistance from 1941, including Robert Capa, Cartier-Bresson, and Jean Dieuzaide, with several forging passes and documents (amongst whom were Robert Doisneau , Hans Bellmer , and Adolfo Kaminsky ). Paris

625-687: A battle against biological decay and historical disaster. Emerging from brutal global conflict, survivors desired material and cultural reconstruction and the appeal of humanism was a return to the values of dignity, equality and tolerance symbolised in an international proclamation and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the General Assembly of the United Nations in Paris on 10 December 1948. That

750-780: A classic example of Cartier-Bresson's ability to capture a decisive moment. He held his first exhibition in France at the Pavillon de Marsan in 1955. Cartier-Bresson's photography took him to many places, including China, Mexico, Canada, the United States, India, Japan, Portugal and the Soviet Union. While traveling in China in 1958, Cartier-Bresson documented the construction of the Ming Tombs Reservoir . He became

875-463: A component in the visual arts (though it had been initially debated whether this was possible), and techniques from Dada, such as photomontage , were used. The following year, on March 26, 1926, Galerie Surréaliste opened with an exhibition by Man Ray. Breton published Surrealism and Painting in 1928 which summarized the movement to that point, though he continued to update the work until the 1960s. The first Surrealist work, according to leader Breton,

1000-884: A current of humanism in photography, first begun in the early 20th century by Jacob Riis , then Lewis Hine , followed by the FSA and the New York Photo League [see the Harlem Project led by Aaron Siskind ] photographers exhibited at Limelight gallery. Books were published such as those by Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor ( An American Exodus , 1939), Walker Evans and James Agee ( Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , 1941), Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell ( You Have Seen Their Faces , 1937), Arthur Rothstein and William Saroyan ( Look At Us ,... , 1967). The seminal work by Robert Frank , The Americans published in France in 1958 ( Robert Delpire ) and

1125-827: A daughter, Mélanie, in May 1972. He held his first exhibition of drawings at the Carlton Gallery in New York in 1975. Cartier-Bresson died in Céreste ( Alpes-de-Haute-Provence , France) on 3 August 2004, 19 days before his 96th birthday. 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. Cartier-Bresson spent more than three decades on assignment for Life and other journals. He traveled without bounds, documenting some of

1250-530: A fashion assignment, but he fared poorly since he had no idea how to direct or interact with the models. Nevertheless, Snow was the first American editor to publish Cartier-Bresson's photographs in a magazine. While in New York, he met photographer Paul Strand , who did camerawork for the Depression-era documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains . When he returned to France, Cartier-Bresson applied for

1375-419: A fledgling, shy and frail, and mild as whey." Embracing the open sexuality offered by Crosby and his wife Caresse , Cartier-Bresson fell into an intense sexual relationship with her that lasted until 1931. Two years after Harry Crosby died by suicide, Cartier-Bresson's affair with Caresse Crosby ended in 1931, leaving him broken-hearted. During conscription he read Conrad 's Heart of Darkness . This gave him

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1500-558: A job with renowned French film director Jean Renoir . He acted in Renoir's 1936 film Partie de campagne and in the 1939 La Règle du jeu , for which he served as second assistant and played a butler. Renoir made Cartier-Bresson act so he could understand how it felt to be on the other side of the camera. Cartier-Bresson also helped Renoir make a film for the Communist party on the 200 families, including his own, who ran France. During

1625-795: A large studio with a small bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom where Cartier-Bresson developed film. When World War II broke out in September 1939, Cartier-Bresson joined the French Army as a Corporal in the film and photo unit of the French Third Army. During the Battle of France , in June 1940 at St. Dié in the Vosges Mountains, he was captured by German soldiers and spent 35 months in prisoner-of-war camps doing forced labor under

1750-475: A mythological, archetypal, allegorical vision, closely related to the world of dreams. The Spanish playwright and director Federico García Lorca , also experimented with surrealism, particularly in his plays The Public (1930), When Five Years Pass (1931), and Play Without a Title (1935). Other surrealist plays include Aragon's Backs to the Wall (1925). Gertrude Stein 's opera Doctor Faustus Lights

1875-410: A practice he saw as "impolite...like coming to a concert with a pistol in your hand." He believed in composing his photographs in the viewfinder, not in the darkroom. He showcased this belief by having nearly all his photographs printed only at full-frame and completely free of any cropping or other darkroom manipulation. He insisted that his prints be left uncropped so as to include a few millimeters of

2000-580: A rather more strenuous set of approaches. Thus, such elements as collage were introduced, arising partly from an ideal of startling juxtapositions as revealed in Pierre Reverdy 's poetry. And—as in Magritte's case (where there is no obvious recourse to either automatic techniques or collage)—the very notion of convulsive joining became a tool for revelation in and of itself. Surrealism was meant to be always in flux—to be more modern than modern—and so it

2125-473: A revolution launched by Apollinaire. One group, led by Yvan Goll , consisted of Pierre Albert-Birot , Paul Dermée , Céline Arnauld , Francis Picabia , Tristan Tzara , Giuseppe Ungaretti , Pierre Reverdy , Marcel Arland , Joseph Delteil , Jean Painlevé and Robert Delaunay , among others. The other group, led by Breton, included Aragon, Desnos, Éluard, Baron, Crevel, Malkine, Jacques-André Boiffard and Jean Carrive, among others. Yvan Goll published

2250-591: A schism between art and politics through his counter-surrealist art-magazine DYN and so prepared the ground for the abstract expressionists. Dalí supported capitalism and the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco but cannot be said to represent a trend in Surrealism in this respect; in fact, he was considered, by Breton and his associates, to have betrayed and left Surrealism. Benjamin Péret, Mary Low, Juan Breá, and Spanish-native Eugenio Fernández Granell joined

2375-524: A single photographer, who would be credited alongside the journalist, or who provided written copy as well as images. Iconic books appeared including Doisneau 's Banlieue de Paris (1949), Izis 's Paris des rêves (1950), Willy Ronis ' Belleville‐Ménilmontant (1954), and Cartier‐Bresson's Images à la sauvette (1952); better known by its English title, which defines the photographic orientation of all these photographers, The Decisive Moment ). National and international exposure of humanist photography

2500-715: A sly humor, a warm enthusiasm ... and convincing aliveness'. In turn, this exposure in The Family of Man inspired a new generation of humanist photographers. The British, exposed to much the same threats and conflict as the rest of Europe during the first half of the century, in their popular magazine Picture Post (1938–1957) did much to promote the humanist imagery of Bert Hardy , Kurt Hutton , Felix H. Man (aka Hans Baumann), Francis Reiss , Thurston Hopkins , John Chillingworth, Grace Robertson , and Leonard McCombe, who eventually joined Life Magazine's staff. Its founder Stefan Lorant explained his motivation; “Father

2625-689: 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 achieved international recognition for his coverage of Gandhi 's funeral in India in 1948 and

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2750-434: Is Golden , later Surrealists, such as Paul Garon , have been interested in—and found parallels to—Surrealism in the improvisation of jazz and the blues . Jazz and blues musicians have occasionally reciprocated this interest. For example, the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition included performances by David "Honeyboy" Edwards . Surrealism as a political force developed unevenly around the world: in some places more emphasis

2875-507: Is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life. The movement in the mid-1920s was characterized by meetings in cafes where the Surrealists played collaborative drawing games, discussed

3000-445: Is better to adopt surrealism than supernaturalism, which I first used" [ Tout bien examiné, je crois en effet qu'il vaut mieux adopter surréalisme que surnaturalisme que j'avais d'abord employé ]. Apollinaire used the term in his program notes for Sergei Diaghilev 's Ballets Russes , Parade , which premiered 18 May 1917. Parade had a one-act scenario by Jean Cocteau and was performed with music by Erik Satie . Cocteau described

3125-462: Is not exhaustive, but presents photographers that can be partially or totally attached to this movement: Surrealism Surrealism is an art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike scenes and ideas. Its intention was, according to leader André Breton , to "resolve

3250-536: Is not like painting," Cartier-Bresson told the Washington Post in 1957. "There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative", he said. "Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever." The photo Rue Mouffetard, Paris , taken in 1954, has since become

3375-403: Is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment"). Cartier-Bresson applied this to his photographic style. He said: "Photographier: c'est dans un même instant et en une fraction de seconde reconnaître un fait et l'organisation rigoureuse de formes perçues visuellement qui expriment et signifient ce fait" ("To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of

3500-516: Is only natural, after all, that they keep pace with scientific and industrial progress. (Apollinaire, 1917) The term was taken up again by Apollinaire, both as subtitle and in the preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias: Drame surréaliste , which was written in 1903 and first performed in 1917. World War I scattered the writers and artists who had been based in Paris, and in the interim, many became involved with Dada, believing that excessive rational thought and bourgeois values had brought

3625-413: Is strongly apparent in W. Eugene Smith 's 1950s development of the photo essay, street photography by Helen Levitt , Vivian Maier et al., and later the work by Bruce Davidson (incl. his East 100th Street) , Eugene Richards, and Mary-Ellen Mark from the 50s into the 90s. The W. Eugene Smith Award continues to award humanitarian and humanist photography. Typically humanist photographers harness

3750-411: Is up to us to apply them to our technique, to improve ourselves, but there is a whole group of fetishes which have developed on the subject of technique. Technique is important only insofar as you must master it in order to communicate what you see... The camera for us is a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy. In the precise functioning of the mechanical object perhaps there is an unconscious compensation for

3875-442: The dérive accords with the working method of the humanist street photographer . Humanist photography emerged and spread after the rise of the mass circulation picture magazines in the 1920s and as photographers formed fraternities such as Le Groupe des XV (which exhibited annually 1946-1957), or joined agencies which promoted their work and fed the demand of the newspaper and magazine audiences, publishers and editors before

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4000-664: The Ballets Russes , would create a decorative form of Surrealism, and he would be an influence on the two artists who would be even more closely associated with Surrealism in the public mind: Dalí and Magritte. He would, however, leave the Surrealist group in 1928. In 1924, Miró and Masson applied Surrealism to painting. The first Surrealist exhibition, La Peinture Surrealiste , was held at Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925. It displayed works by Masson, Man Ray , Paul Klee , Miró, and others. The show confirmed that Surrealism had

4125-685: The Cubist painter and sculptor André Lhote . Lhote's ambition was to integrate the Cubists' approach to reality with classical artistic forms; he wanted to link the French classical tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David to Modernism . Cartier-Bresson also studied painting with society portraitist Jacques Émile Blanche . During that period, he read Dostoevsky , Schopenhauer , Rimbaud , Nietzsche , Mallarmé , Freud , Proust , Joyce , Hegel , Engels and Marx . Lhote took his pupils to

4250-661: The Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1933, and subsequently at the Ateneo Club in Madrid. In 1934 in Mexico, he shared an exhibition with Manuel Álvarez Bravo . In the beginning, he did not photograph much in his native France. It would be years before he photographed there extensively. In 1934, Cartier-Bresson met a young Polish intellectual, a photographer named David Szymin who was called "Chim" because his name

4375-556: The Louvre to study classical artists and to Paris galleries to study contemporary art. Cartier-Bresson's interest in modern art was combined with an admiration for the works of the Renaissance masters: Jan van Eyck , Paolo Uccello , Masaccio , Piero della Francesca . Cartier-Bresson regarded Lhote as his teacher of "photography without a camera." Although Cartier-Bresson became frustrated with Lhote's "rule-laden" approach to art,

4500-559: The Manifeste du surréalisme , 1 October 1924, in his first and only issue of Surréalisme two weeks prior to the release of Breton's Manifeste du surréalisme , published by Éditions du Sagittaire, 15 October 1924. Goll and Breton clashed openly, at one point literally fighting, at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées, over the rights to the term Surrealism. In the end, Breton won the battle through tactical and numerical superiority. Though

4625-664: The POUM during the Spanish Civil War . Breton's followers, along with the Communist Party , were working for the "liberation of man". However, Breton's group refused to prioritize the proletarian struggle over radical creation such that their struggles with the Party made the late 1920s a turbulent time for both. Many individuals closely associated with Breton, notably Aragon, left his group to work more closely with

4750-536: The Spanish Civil War , Cartier-Bresson co-directed an anti-fascist film with Herbert Kline , to promote the Republican medical services. Cartier-Bresson's first photojournalist photos to be published came in 1937 when he covered the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth , for the French weekly Regards. He focused on the new monarch's adoring subjects lining the London streets, and took no pictures of

4875-464: The second World War , Enrico Donati , Vinicius Pradella and Denis Fabbri became involved as well. Though Breton admired Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp and courted them to join the movement, they remained peripheral. More writers also joined, including former Dadaist Tristan Tzara , René Char , and Georges Sadoul . In 1925 an autonomous Surrealist group formed in Brussels. The group included

5000-411: The 'fantastique social de la rue' (social fantasticality of the street) and their style of image making rendered romantic and poetic the way of life of ordinary European people, particularly in Paris. The preoccupation with everyday life emerged after World War I . As a reaction to the atrocities of the trenches, Paris became a haven for intellectual, cultural and artistic life, attracting artists from

5125-460: The 1930s many Surrealists had strongly identified themselves with communism. The foremost document of this tendency within Surrealism is the Manifesto for a Free Revolutionary Art , published under the names of Breton and Diego Rivera , but actually co-authored by Breton and Leon Trotsky . However, in 1933 the Surrealists' assertion that a " proletarian literature " within a capitalist society

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5250-578: The 1930s. The late 1940s and 50s saw a further influx of foreign photographers sympathetic to this movement, including Ed van der Elsken from the Netherlands who recorded the interactions at the bistrot Chez Moineau, the dirt-cheap refuge of bohemian youths and of Guy Debord , Michele Bernstein , Gil J. Wolman , Ivan Chtcheglov and the other members of the Letterist International and the emerging Situationists whose theory of

5375-413: The 1948 ballet Paris-Magie (scenario by Lise Deharme ), the operas La Petite Sirène (book by Philippe Soupault) and Le Maître (book by Eugène Ionesco). Tailleferre also wrote popular songs to texts by Claude Marci, the wife of Henri Jeanson, whose portrait had been painted by Magritte in the 1930s. Even though Breton by 1946 responded rather negatively to the subject of music with his essay Silence

5500-470: The 1970s, he largely discontinued his photographic work, instead opting to paint. Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup-en-Brie , Seine-et-Marne, France. 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

5625-588: The 35mm Contax (1936). They revolutionized the practice of documentary photography and reportage by enabling the photographer to shoot quickly and unobtrusively in all conditions, to seize the "decisive moment" which Cartier-Bresson defined as "the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes" and thus support Cornell Capa 's notion of "concerned photography", described as "work committed to contributing to or understanding humanity's well-being". The humanist current continued into

5750-564: 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." He studied painting when he

5875-593: The Communists. Surrealists have often sought to link their efforts with political ideals and activities. In the Declaration of January 27, 1925 , for example, members of the Paris-based Bureau of Surrealist Research (including Breton, Aragon and Artaud, as well as some two dozen others) declared their affinity for revolutionary politics. While this was initially a somewhat vague formulation, by

6000-487: The Dutch surrealist photographer Emiel van Moerkerken came to Breton, he did not want to sign the manifesto because he was not a Trotskyist. For Breton being a communist was not enough. Breton denied Van Moerkerken's pictures for a publication afterwards. This caused a split in surrealism. Others fought for complete liberty from political ideologies, like Wolfgang Paalen , who, after Trotsky's assassination in Mexico, prepared

6125-475: The European photography in the show. Steichen said that based on his experience of meeting photographers in Europe as he sought images of ‘everydayness' which he defined as 'the beauty of the things that fill our lives', for the exhibition, that the French were the only photographers who had thoroughly photographed scenes of daily life. These were practitioners he admired for their conveying 'tender simplicity,

6250-731: The French Dora Maar , the American Man Ray , the French/Hungarian Brassaï , French Claude Cahun and the Dutch Emiel van Moerkerken . The word surrealist was first used by Apollinaire to describe his 1917 play Les Mamelles de Tirésias ("The Breasts of Tiresias"), which was later adapted into an opera by Francis Poulenc . Roger Vitrac 's The Mysteries of Love (1927) and Victor, or The Children Take Over (1928) are often considered

6375-603: The French language title actually translates as " images on the sly " or "hastily taken images", Images à la sauvette included a portfolio of 126 of his photos from the East and the West. The book's cover was drawn by Henri Matisse . For his 4,500-word philosophical preface, Cartier-Bresson took his keynote text from Volume 2 of the Memoirs of 17th century Cardinal de Retz , "Il n'y a rien dans ce monde qui n'ait un moment decisif" ("There

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6500-537: The Gare Saint-Lazare , are of seemingly unimportant moments of ordinary daily life. Cartier-Bresson did not like to be photographed and treasured his privacy. Photographs of Cartier-Bresson are scant. When he accepted an honorary degree from Oxford University in 1975, he held a paper in front of his face to avoid being photographed. In a Charlie Rose interview in 2000, Cartier-Bresson noted that it wasn't necessarily that he hated to be photographed, but it

6625-491: The Lights (1938) has also been described as "American Surrealism", though it is also related to a theatrical form of cubism . In the 1920s several composers were influenced by Surrealism, or by individuals in the Surrealist movement. Among them were Bohuslav Martinů , André Souris , Erik Satie , Francis Poulenc , and Edgard Varèse , who stated that his work Arcana was drawn from a dream sequence. Souris in particular

6750-666: The Nazis. He twice tried and failed to escape from the prison camp, and was punished by solitary confinement. His third escape was successful and he hid on a farm in Touraine before getting false papers that allowed him to travel in France. In France, he worked for the underground, aiding other escapees and working secretly with other photographers to cover the occupation and then the liberation of France . In 1943, he dug up his beloved Leica camera, which he had buried in Vosges farmland . At

6875-537: The Surrealists and Berenice Abbott, the life work of Eugène Atget in the empty streets of Paris also became a reference. At the end of World War II , in 1946, French intellectuals Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux embraced humanism; Sartre argued that existentialism was a humanism entailing freedom of choice and a responsibility for defining oneself, while at the Sorbonne in an address sponsored by UNESCO , Malraux depicted human culture as 'humanisme tragique',

7000-537: 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. The historian Peter Galassi explains: The Surrealists approached photography in the same way that Aragon and Breton ...approached the street: with a voracious appetite for

7125-438: The Surrealists in developing methods to liberate imagination. They embraced idiosyncrasy , while rejecting the idea of an underlying madness. As Dalí later proclaimed, "There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad." Beside the use of dream analysis, they emphasized that "one could combine inside the same frame, elements not normally found together to produce illogical and startling effects." Breton included

7250-572: The USA the following year (Grove Press), the result of his two Guggenheim grants, can also be considered an extension of the humanist photography current in the USA which had a demonstrable impact on American photography. In spite of the Red Scare and McCarthyism in the 1950s (which banned the Photo League) a humanist ethos and vision was promoted by The Family of Man exhibition world tour, and

7375-593: The advent of television broadcasting which rapidly displaced these audiences at the close of the 1960s. These publications include the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung , Vu , Point de Vue , Regards , Paris Match , Picture Post , Life , Look , Le Monde illustré , Plaisir de France and Réalités which competed to give ever larger space to photo-stories; extended articles and editorials that were profusely illustrated, or that consisted solely of photographs with captions, often by

7500-440: The anxieties and uncertainties of daily endeavor. In any case, people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing. He started a tradition of testing new camera lenses by taking photographs of ducks in urban parks. He never published the images but referred to them as 'my only superstition' as he considered it a 'baptism' of the lens. Humanist photography a lyrical trend, warm, fervent, and responsive to

7625-658: The ballet as "realistic". Apollinaire went further, describing Parade as "surrealistic": This new alliance—I say new, because until now scenery and costumes were linked only by factitious bonds—has given rise, in Parade , to a kind of surrealism, which I consider to be the point of departure for a whole series of manifestations of the New Spirit that is making itself felt today and that will certainly appeal to our best minds. We may expect it to bring about profound changes in our arts and manners through universal joyfulness, for it

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7750-584: The best examples of Surrealist theatre, despite his expulsion from the movement in 1926. The plays were staged at the Theatre Alfred Jarry , the theatre Vitrac co-founded with Antonin Artaud , another early Surrealist who was expelled from the movement. Following his collaboration with Vitrac, Artaud would extend Surrealist thought through his theory of the Theatre of Cruelty . Artaud rejected

7875-469: The book's texts. 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

8000-487: The concepts, he couldn't express them; dissatisfied with his experiments, he destroyed most of his early paintings. 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

8125-424: The conflict of the war upon the world. The Dadaists protested with anti-art gatherings, performances, writings and art works. After the war, when they returned to Paris, the Dada activities continued. During the war, André Breton , who had trained in medicine and psychiatry, served in a neurological hospital where he used Sigmund Freud 's psychoanalytic methods with soldiers suffering from shell-shock . Meeting

8250-514: The edge of the Eawy Forest while Debussy 's String Quartet was played. Although Cartier-Bresson took a portable camera (smaller than a Brownie Box) to Côte d'Ivoire, only seven photographs survived the tropics. 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

8375-464: The end of the war he was asked by the American Office of War Information to make a documentary, Le Retour (The Return) about returning French prisoners and displaced persons. His film spurred a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) , that would later tour the country. The show debuted in 1947 accompanied by the publication of his first book, The Photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Lincoln Kirstein and Beaumont Newhall wrote

8500-490: The first Western photographer to photograph "freely" in the post-war Soviet Union. In 1962, on behalf of Vogue , he went to Sardinia for about twenty days. There he visited Nuoro, Oliena, Orgosolo Mamoiada Desulo, Orosei, Cala Gonone, Orani (hosted by his friend Costantino Nivola ), San Leonardo di Siete Fuentes, and Cagliari. Cartier-Bresson withdrew as a principal of Magnum (which still distributes his photographs) in 1966 to concentrate on portraiture and landscapes. He

8625-513: The foundation relocated from the Montparnasse district to Le Marais . The highest price reached by one of his photographs was when Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare sold at Christie's , on 17 November 2011, by $ 590,455. Cartier-Bresson's photographs were also influential in the development of cinéma vérité film. In particular, he is credited as the inspiration for the National Film Board of Canada 's early work in this genre with its 1958 Candid Eye series. Cartier-Bresson almost always used

8750-406: The gaining of independence from the Dutch. In 1950, Cartier-Bresson had traveled to the South India. He 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. A few days later he also visited and photographed Sri Aurobindo, Mother and Sri Aurobindo Ashram , Pondicherry. Magnum's mission

8875-425: The great upheavals of the 20th century — the Spanish Civil War , the liberation of Paris in 1944, the fall of the Kuomintang in China to the communists, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the May 1968 events in Paris, the Berlin Wall. And along the way he paused to document portraits of Camus , Picasso , Colette , Matisse , Pound and Giacometti . But many of his most renowned photographs, such as Behind

9000-583: The idea of escaping and finding adventure on the Côte d'Ivoire in French colonial Africa. He survived by shooting game and selling it to local villagers. From hunting, he learned methods which he later used in photography. On the Côte d'Ivoire, he contracted blackwater fever , which nearly killed him. While still feverish, he sent instructions to his grandfather for his own funeral, asking to be buried in Normandy, at

9125-588: The idea of the startling juxtapositions in his 1924 manifesto, taking it in turn from a 1918 essay by poet Pierre Reverdy , which said: "a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be−the greater its emotional power and poetic reality." The group aimed to revolutionize human experience, in its personal, cultural, social, and political aspects. They wanted to free people from false rationality, and restrictive customs and structures. Breton proclaimed that

9250-542: The idea that ordinary and depictive expressions are vital and important, but that the sense of their arrangement must be open to the full range of imagination according to the Hegelian Dialectic . They also looked to the Marxist dialectic and the work of such theorists as Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse . Freud's work with free association, dream analysis, and the unconscious was of utmost importance to

9375-574: The influence of Miró and the drawing style of Picasso is visible with the use of fluid curving and intersecting lines and colour, whereas the first takes a directness that would later be influential in movements such as Pop art . Giorgio de Chirico, and his previous development of metaphysical art , was one of the important joining figures between the philosophical and visual aspects of Surrealism. Between 1911 and 1917, he adopted an unornamented depictional style whose surface would be adopted by others later. The Red Tower (La tour rouge) from 1913 shows

9500-492: The influences on Surrealism, examples of Surrealist works, and discussion of Surrealist automatism. He provided the following definitions: Dictionary: Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation. Encyclopedia: Surrealism. Philosophy. Surrealism

9625-630: The king. His photo credit read "Cartier", as he was hesitant to use his full family name. Between 1937 and 1939, Cartier-Bresson worked as a photographer for the French Communists' evening paper, Ce soir . With Chim and Capa, Cartier-Bresson was a leftist, but he did not join the French Communist party. In 1937, Cartier-Bresson married a Javanese dancer, Ratna Mohini . They lived in a fourth-floor servants' flat in Paris at 19, rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs (now rue Danielle Casanova),

9750-807: The last stage of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. He covered the last six months of the Kuomintang administration and the first six months of the Maoist People's Republic . He also photographed the last surviving Imperial eunuchs in Beijing, as the city was being liberated by the communists. In Shanghai, he often worked in the company of photojournalist Sam Tata , whom Cartier-Bresson had previously befriended in Bombay. From China, he went on to Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), where he documented

9875-537: The late 1960s and early 70s, also in the United States when America came to dominate the medium, with photography in academic artistic and art history programs becoming institutionalised in such programs as the Visual Studies Workshop , after which attention turned to photography as a fine art and documentary image-making was interrogated and transformed in Postmodernism . The list below

10000-458: The line used to divide Dada and Surrealism among art experts is the pairing of 1925's Little Machine Constructed by Minimax Dadamax in Person (Von minimax dadamax selbst konstruiertes maschinchen) with The Kiss (Le Baiser) from 1927 by Max Ernst. The first is generally held to have a distance, and erotic subtext, whereas the second presents an erotic act openly and directly. In the second

10125-452: The main route toward a higher reality. But—as in Breton's case—much of what is presented as purely automatic is actually edited and very "thought out". Breton himself later admitted that automatic writing's centrality had been overstated, and other elements were introduced, especially as the growing involvement of visual artists in the movement forced the issue, since automatic painting required

10250-415: The majority of Western theatre as a perversion of its original intent, which he felt should be a mystical, metaphysical experience. Instead, he envisioned a theatre that would be immediate and direct, linking the unconscious minds of performers and spectators in a sort of ritual event, Artaud created in which emotions, feelings, and the metaphysical were expressed not through language but physically, creating

10375-586: The most." Back in Paris, Breton joined in Dada activities and started the literary journal Littérature along with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault . They began experimenting with automatic writing —spontaneously writing without censoring their thoughts—and published the writings, as well as accounts of dreams, in the magazine. Breton and Soupault continued writing evolving their techniques of automatism and published The Magnetic Fields (1920). By October 1924, two rival Surrealist groups had formed to publish

10500-478: The movement was Paris , France. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, impacting the visual arts , literature, film, and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy, and social theory. The word surrealism was first coined in March 1917 by Guillaume Apollinaire . He wrote in a letter to Paul Dermée : "All things considered, I think in fact it

10625-609: The musician, poet, and artist E. L. T. Mesens , painter and writer René Magritte , Paul Nougé , Marcel Lecomte , and André Souris . In 1927 they were joined by the writer Louis Scutenaire . They corresponded regularly with the Paris group, and in 1927 both Goemans and Magritte moved to Paris and frequented Breton's circle. The artists, with their roots in Dada and Cubism , the abstraction of Wassily Kandinsky , Expressionism , and Post-Impressionism , also reached to older "bloodlines" or proto-surrealists such as Hieronymus Bosch , and

10750-444: The philosophical movement first and foremost (for instance, of the "pure psychic automatism " Breton speaks of in the first Surrealist Manifesto), with the works themselves being secondary, i.e., artifacts of surrealist experimentation. Leader Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was, above all, a revolutionary movement. At the time, the movement was associated with political causes such as communism and anarchism . It

10875-437: The photograph's combination of description and emotional affect to both inform and move the viewer, who may identify with the subject; their images are appreciated as continuing the pre-war tradition of photo reportage as social or documentary records of human experience. It is praised for expressing humanist values such as empathy , solidarity , sometimes humor, and mutual respect of cameraperson and subject in recognition of

11000-419: The photographer, usually an editorial freelancer , as auteur on a par with other artists. Developments in technology supported these characteristics. The Ermanox with its fast f /1.8 and f /2 lenses (6 cm x 4.5 cm format, 1924) and the 35mm Leica , 1925) camera, miniaturized and portable, had become available by the end of the 1920s, followed by the medium-format Rolleiflex (1929), and

11125-658: The photographic image could become a universal language in accord with these principles was a notion circulated at a UNESCO conference in 1958 As France in particular, but also Belgium and the Netherlands , emerged from the dark period of the Occupation (1940–4), the liberation of Paris in August 1944 released photographers to respond to reconstruction and the Fourth Republic 's (1947–59) drive to redefine

11250-424: The poetic undercurrents, but also to the connotations and the overtones which "exist in ambiguous relationships to the visual images." Because Surrealist writers seldom, if ever, appear to organize their thoughts and the images they present, some people find much of their work difficult to parse. This notion however is a superficial comprehension, prompted no doubt by Breton's initial emphasis on automatic writing as

11375-799: The precursors of Surrealism. Examples of Surrealist literature are Artaud's Le Pèse-Nerfs (1926), Aragon's Irene's Cunt (1927), Péret's Death to the Pigs (1929), Crevel's Mr. Knife Miss Fork (1931), Sadegh Hedayat 's the Blind Owl (1937), and Breton's Sur la route de San Romano (1948). La Révolution surréaliste continued publication into 1929 with most pages densely packed with columns of text, but which also included reproductions of art, among them works by de Chirico, Ernst, Masson, and Man Ray. Other works included books, poems, pamphlets, automatic texts and theoretical tracts. Early films by Surrealists include: Famous Surrealist photographers are

11500-413: The previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or surreality. It produced works of painting, writing, theatre, filmmaking, photography, and other media as well. Works of Surrealism feature the element of surprise , unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur . However, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of

11625-446: The quarrel over the anteriority of Surrealism concluded with the victory of Breton, the history of surrealism from that moment would remain marked by fractures, resignations, and resounding excommunications, with each surrealist having their own view of the issue and goals, and accepting more or less the definitions laid out by André Breton. Breton's 1924 Surrealist Manifesto defines the purposes of Surrealism. He included citations of

11750-404: 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. Cartier-Bresson began socializing with

11875-617: The significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression."). Both titles came from Tériade , the Greek-born French publisher whom Cartier-Bresson admired. He gave the book its French title, Images à la Sauvette , loosely translated as "images on the run" or "stolen images." Dick Simon of Simon & Schuster came up with the English title The Decisive Moment . Margot Shore, Magnum's Paris bureau chief, translated Cartier-Bresson's French preface into English. "Photography

12000-633: The small camera gave him in a crowd or during an intimate moment was essential in overcoming the formal and unnatural behavior of those who were aware of being photographed. He enhanced his anonymity by painting all shiny parts of the Leica with black paint. The Leica opened up new possibilities in photography—the ability to capture the world in its actual state of movement and transformation. Restless, he photographed in Berlin , Brussels, Warsaw , Prague, Budapest and Madrid . His photographs were first exhibited at

12125-416: The so-called primitive and naive arts. André Masson 's automatic drawings of 1923 are often used as the point of the acceptance of visual arts and the break from Dada, since they reflect the influence of the idea of the unconscious mind . Another example is Giacometti's 1925 Torso , which marked his movement to simplified forms and inspiration from preclassical sculpture. However, a striking example of

12250-575: The stark colour contrasts and illustrative style later adopted by Surrealist painters. His 1914 The Nostalgia of the Poet (La Nostalgie du poète) has the figure turned away from the viewer, and the juxtaposition of a bust with glasses and a fish as a relief defies conventional explanation. He was also a writer whose novel Hebdomeros presents a series of dreamscapes with an unusual use of punctuation, syntax, and grammar designed to create an atmosphere and frame its images. His images, including set designs for

12375-447: The sufferings of humanity [which] began to assert itself during the 1950s in Europe, particularly in France ... photographers dreamed of a world of mutual succour and compassion, encapsulated ideally in a solicitous vision. Photographing on the street or in the bistro primarily in black‐and‐white in available light with the popular small cameras of the day, these image-makers discovered what the writer Pierre Mac Orlan (1882-1970) called

12500-581: 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." He acquired the Leica camera with 50 mm lens in Marseilles that would accompany him for many years. The anonymity that

12625-644: The theories of Surrealism, and developed a variety of techniques such as automatic drawing . Breton initially doubted that visual arts could even be useful in the Surrealist movement since they appeared to be less malleable and open to chance and automatism. This caution was overcome by the discovery of such techniques as frottage , grattage and decalcomania . Soon more visual artists became involved, including Giorgio de Chirico , Max Ernst , Joan Miró , Francis Picabia , Yves Tanguy , Salvador Dalí , Luis Buñuel , Alberto Giacometti , Valentine Hugo , Méret Oppenheim , Toyen , and Kansuke Yamamoto . Later, after

12750-548: The true aim of Surrealism was "long live the social revolution, and it alone!" To this goal, at various times Surrealists aligned with communism and anarchism . In 1924, two Surrealist factions declared their philosophy in two separate Surrealist Manifestos. That same year the Bureau of Surrealist Research was established and began publishing the journal La Révolution surréaliste . Leading up to 1924, two rival surrealist groups had formed. Each group claimed to be successors of

12875-604: The unexposed negative around the image area, resulting in a black frame around the developed picture. Cartier-Bresson worked exclusively in black and white, other than a few experiments in color. He 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". Technical aspects of photography were valid for him only where they allowed him to express what he saw: Constant new discoveries in chemistry and optics are widening considerably our field of action. It

13000-425: The usual and unusual...The Surrealists recognized in plain photographic fact an essential quality that had been excluded from prior theories of photographic realism. They saw that ordinary photographs, especially when uprooted from their practical functions, contain a wealth of unintended, unpredictable meanings. Cartier-Bresson matured artistically in this stormy cultural and political atmosphere. But, although he knew

13125-468: The whole of Europe and the United States. With the release of the first Leica and Contax range-finder cameras, photographers took to the street and documented life by day and night. Such photographers as André Kertész , Brassaï , Henri Cartier-Bresson emerged during the period between the two world wars thanks to the Illustrated Press ( Vu and Regards ). Having been brought to notice by

13250-411: The young writer Jacques Vaché , Breton felt that Vaché was the spiritual son of writer and pataphysics founder Alfred Jarry . He admired the young writer's anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition. Later Breton wrote, "In literature, I was successively taken with Rimbaud , with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau , with Lautréamont , but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe

13375-420: Was Les Chants de Maldoror , and the first work written and published by his group of Surréalistes was Les Champs Magnétiques (May–June 1919). Littérature contained automatist works and accounts of dreams. The magazine and the portfolio both showed their disdain for literal meanings given to objects and focused rather on the undertones; the poetic undercurrents present. Not only did they give emphasis to

13500-476: Was Trotskyist , communist , or anarchist . The split from Dada has been characterised as a split between anarchists and communists, with the Surrealists as communist. Breton and his comrades supported Leon Trotsky and his International Left Opposition for a while, though there was an openness to anarchism that manifested more fully after World War II. Some Surrealists, such as Benjamin Péret , Mary Low, and Juan Breá, aligned with forms of left communism . When

13625-677: Was a better tactic for societal change than those of Dada, as led by Tzara, who was now among their rivals. Breton's group grew to include writers and artists from various media such as Paul Éluard , Benjamin Péret , René Crevel , Robert Desnos , Jacques Baron , Max Morise , Pierre Naville , Roger Vitrac , Gala Éluard , Max Ernst , Salvador Dalí , Luis Buñuel , Man Ray , Hans Arp , Georges Malkine , Michel Leiris , Georges Limbour , Antonin Artaud , Raymond Queneau , André Masson , Joan Miró , Marcel Duchamp , Jacques Prévert , and Yves Tanguy , Dora Maar As they developed their philosophy, they believed that Surrealism would advocate

13750-476: Was a crossroad of modernist culture and so cosmopolitan influences abound in humanist photography, recruiting emigrés who impressed their stamp on French photography, the earliest being Hungarian André Kertész who arrived on the scene in the mid-1920s; followed by his compatriots Ergy Landau , Brassai (Gyula Halasz), and Robert Capa (Endre Friedmann), and by the Pole "Chim" Seymour ( Dawid Szymin ), among others, in

13875-399: Was a humanist. When I lost him in the war, it changed me. He was in his forties, and I changed. I championed the cause of the common man, for people who were not as well off as myself” The movement is in marked contrast to the contemporaneous ‘art’ photography of the USA, which was a country less directly exposed to the trauma that inspired the humanist philosophy. Nevertheless, there too ran

14000-399: Was accelerated through exhibitions and of particular importance in this regard is The Family of Man , a vast travelling exhibition curated by Edward Steichen for MoMA , which presented a unifying humanist manifesto in the form of images selected from amongst, literally, a million. Thirty-one French photographs appeared in The Family of Man , a contribution representing almost one-third of

14125-454: Was also close friends with brothers Alberto Giacometti and Diego Giacometti in Paris. In 1967, he was divorced from his first wife of 30 years, Ratna (known as "Elie"). In 1968, he began to turn away from photography and return to his passion for drawing and painting. He admitted that perhaps he had said all he could through photography. He married Magnum photographer Martine Franck , thirty years younger than himself, in 1970. The couple had

14250-481: Was associated with the movement: he had a long relationship with Magritte, and worked on Paul Nougé 's publication Adieu Marie . Music by composers from across the twentieth century have been associated with surrealist principles, including Pierre Boulez , György Ligeti , Mauricio Kagel , Olivier Messiaen , and Thomas Adès . Germaine Tailleferre of the French group Les Six wrote several works which could be considered to be inspired by Surrealism , including

14375-432: 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 . Since his parents were providing financial support, Henri pursued 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

14500-510: Was difficult to pronounce. Szymin later changed his name to David Seymour . The two had much in common culturally. Through Chim, Cartier-Bresson met a Hungarian photographer named Endré Friedmann, who later changed his name to Robert Capa . Cartier-Bresson traveled to the United States in 1935 with an invitation to exhibit his work at New York's Julien Levy Gallery. He shared display space with fellow photographers Walker Evans and Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Carmel Snow of Harper's Bazaar gave him

14625-817: Was impossible led to their break with the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, and the expulsion of Breton, Éluard and Crevel from the Communist Party. In 1925, the Paris Surrealist group and the extreme left of the French Communist Party came together to support Abd-el-Krim , leader of the Rif uprising against French colonialism in Morocco . In an open letter to writer and French ambassador to Japan, Paul Claudel ,

14750-551: Was influenced by the Dada movement of the 1910s. The term "Surrealism" originated with Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917. However, the Surrealist movement was not officially established until after October 1924, when the Surrealist Manifesto published by French poet and critic André Breton succeeded in claiming the term for his group over a rival faction led by Yvan Goll , who had published his own surrealist manifesto two weeks prior. The most important center of

14875-642: Was just 5 years old, taking an apprenticeship in his uncle Louis' studio. After trying to learn music , Cartier-Bresson was introduced to oil painting by his uncle Louis, a gifted painter and winner of the Prix de Rome in 1910. But his painting lessons were cut short when uncle Louis was killed in World War I. In 1927, Cartier-Bresson entered a private art school and the Lhote Academy, the Parisian studio of

15000-563: Was natural there should be a rapid shuffling of the philosophy as new challenges arose. Artists such as Max Ernst and his surrealist collages demonstrate this shift to a more modern art form that also comments on society. Surrealists revived interest in Isidore Ducasse, known by his pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont , and for the line "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella", and Arthur Rimbaud , two late 19th-century writers believed to be

15125-621: Was on artistic practices, in other places on political practices, and in other places still, Surrealist praxis looked to supersede both the arts and politics. During the 1930s, the Surrealist idea spread from Europe to North America, South America (founding of the Mandrágora group in Chile in 1938), Central America , the Caribbean , and throughout Asia, as both an artistic idea and as an ideology of political change. Politically, Surrealism

15250-481: 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

15375-640: Was that he was embarrassed by the notion of being photographed for being famous. Cartier-Bresson believed that what went on beneath the surface was nobody's business but his own. He did recall that he once confided his innermost secrets to a Paris taxi driver, certain that he would never meet the man again. In 2003, he created the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris with his wife, the Belgian photographer Martine Franck and his daughter to preserve and share his legacy. In 2018,

15500-471: Was to "feel the pulse" of the times and some of its first projects were People Live Everywhere , Youth of the World , Women of the World and The Child Generation . Magnum aimed to use photography in the service of humanity, and provided arresting, widely viewed images. In 1952, Cartier-Bresson published his book Images à la sauvette, whose English-language edition was titled The Decisive Moment, although

15625-700: Was toting Joyce under my arm and a Lebel rifle on my shoulder." In 1929, Cartier-Bresson's air squadron commandant placed him under house arrest for hunting without a licence. Cartier-Bresson met American expatriate Harry Crosby at Le Bourget , who persuaded the commandant to release Cartier-Bresson into his custody for a few days. The two men both had an interest in photography, and Harry presented Henri with his first camera. They spent their time together taking and printing pictures at Crosby's home, Le Moulin du Soleil (The Sun Mill), near Paris in Ermenonville , France. Crosby later said Cartier-Bresson "looked like

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