Famous Photographer Research Essay
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Blair Li January 14,2015
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Biography
Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2014)
Henri Cartier-Bresson, “father of modern photojournalism”, was born on August 22, 1908 in Chanteloup, France. He was the oldest of five children, and his family was wealthy with his father making a fortune as a textile manufacturer. He was interested and always passionate about art since young. As a teenager, Cartier-Bresson was rebelling against his parents' formal rules and restrictions. He explored the use of a 3×4 view camera for family pictures and photos around the neighbourhood around that time period. Throughout the 1920s, he studied and worked in the city Paris. In
1927 he went studying painting under…show more content… The three soon became friends with the same interest and shared a studio throughout the early 1930s. By the mid 1930s his work had been shown in major exhibits in Mexico, New York, and Madrid. Surprisingly, it was not until 1937 that the world could see his work of photojournalism. At the same time, Henri Cartier-Bresson began his marriage with the Indonesian dancer Ratna Mohini in 1937. In 1940, his life had a dramatic turn. As the German and France broke into wars, Cartier-Bresson joined the French Army but was soon captured by German and was prisoned for the next three years. In 1943, at his third attempt, Cartier-Bresson escaped for good and immediately returned to his photography and film work. In 1968 he began quitting photography and started focusing on his passion of painting. His first marriage ended in 1967, and then he married photographer Martine Franck, in 1970. Officially Cartier-Bresson retired from photography in the early 1970s and by 1975, using his own words, his camera was already kept in a safe and rarely taken out. Cartier- Bresson, being one of the major artists of the 20th century, died in Provence, France on August 3,…show more content… The miniature camera was very useful because it could be used at eye level and easily accessed to photograph precise moments. Henri believed that it helped him to be a part of the action and would not separate him from the scene as he tried to capture that decisive moment. He stressed that being in the middle of the action or the scene and being fully involved in the events around him are extremely important. As classically trained painter Henri had an impeccable sense of both composition of subject, which enabled him to be a master of candid photography. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photography was exclusively black and white, with subjects of what he saw around him. He believed what created the rhythm of an image were the events happening around people, and photographers must work in harmony with that rhythm to able to capture the decisive moment of the subject matter. In one of his images it was 5 men and women having a picnic or fishing by a lake, where every single person is at a very natural state, and Henri’s lenses reflected his view of seeing everything as a painting. One of his most famous work, "Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, 1932", captured a man trying to jump