Iglobalphotographer magazine edition 1

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson; August 22, 1908 – August 3, 2004) was
a French photographer considered the master of candid
photography, and an early user of 35 mm film. He helped
develop street photography, and approvingly cited a notion of
the inevitability of a decisive moment, a term adopted as the
title for his first major book. His work has influenced many
photographers. Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloupen-Brie,
Seine-et-Marne, France, the oldest of five children. His
father was a wealthy textile manufacturer, whose Cartier-
Bresson thread was a staple of French sewing kits. His mother's
family was cotton merchants and landowners from Normandy,
where Henri spent part of his childhood. The Cartier-Bresson
family lived in a bourgeois neighborhood in Paris, Rue de
Lisbonne, near Place de l'Europe and Parc Monceau. His
parents supported him financially so Henri could pursue
photography more freely than his contemporaries. Henri also
sketched.
Cartier-Bresson nearly always used 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 an medium format twin-lens reflex camera, miniatureformat
cameras gave Cartier-Bresson what he called "the velvet hand...the hawk's eye."
He never photographed with flash, 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 were not cropped as they include the first few millimeters of 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 unsuccessful attempts 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 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 the anxieties and uncertainties of daily endeavor. In any
case, people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.
44