| The great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson has died He died on Monday, just shy of 96, in the south of France, in the town of Isle-sur-la-Sorgue (l'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue), and was buried on Wednesday in the presence of his closest people. The family and the Magnum agency announced the death of the master only on Wednesday.
Henri Cartier-Bresson was born on August 22, 1908 in the city of Chantloup, near Paris. He began taking photographs in 1926, became truly interested in photography in 1930, and in 1933 his first solo exhibition took place in Spain. From 1936 to 1939, Cartier-Bresson worked as an assistant to the French director Jean Renoir. At the very beginning of the Second World War, Cartier-Bresson joined the French army, but very soon he was captured, fled, and was in the Resistance. After the end of the war, he worked as a cameraman for the United States Office of War Information and made a famous documentary about the return of prisoners of war to France. In 1947, Cartier-Bresson, along with Robert Capa and David Seymour, became the founder of the legendary independent photography association Magnum in New York.
Cartier-Bresson is a genius of the snapshot. His work defined the style of photography of the mid-twentieth century - the time when small and fast cameras appeared, relegating the achievements of the masters of the beginning of the century to the past. His photographs seemed random - it was so difficult to believe the incredible luck and inhuman speed of the photographer’s reaction. That a stopped moment could be - could be - so simple and beautiful. That a person with a camera can feel an event so enthusiastically, see it from the outside and calmly predict the development of the situation.
Cartier-Bresson despised photographic tricks and manipulations, used only black and white film, banishing even silver, and believed that the photographer should work simply, quickly and accurately: “To shoot means to determine immediately and in a split second an event and the precise organization of visual forms that express and define this event. This means lining up the head, the eye... along one line. This is a way to live."
Cartier-Bresson photographed Mao's rise to power, took the last photographs of Mahatma Gandhi, worked in Indonesia, Mexico, and traveled extensively in Europe and America. He was the first Western photographer to come to the Soviet Union in 1954, almost immediately after Stalin’s death, and published the album “Muscovites” the following year, 1955. In 1972, he returned to the USSR - Cartier-Bresson loved to return, “to compare the country with itself” decades later. The album "About Russia" was released in 1974. For the exhibition in Moscow at the Photobiennale 2000, Cartier-Bresson selected the photographs himself.
In 1975, Cartier-Bresson practically abandoned photography. Only extraordinary events, such as demonstrations against the Iraq War, could force him to uncover his camera. Recent years have been devoted to drawing - the passion of my youth - and archiving my own heritage. Faina BALAKHOVSKAYA |
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