Line of sight: the head, heart and eye of Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier–Bresson died on 2 August 2004 aged 96. He was the world’s greatest documentary photographer, and his photographs have become some of the most familiar photographic images of the 20th century. But what made him a great photographer?

He was an intellectual; when he was in his 20s he spent time with writers and artists, preferring to talk about politics rather than photography. He had an innate sense of composition, gained through his training as an artist under André Lhote and through his study of works of art in museums. He had an acute psychological insight which makes his portraits as powerful as his documentary photographs.

And then there is the photographer’s most important attribute: “being there”. Photography, unlike other art forms, requires the photographer to be there in front of the subject with a camera loaded with film. This requires the photographer to know where to go, to have the stamina and courage to venture into difficult and dangerous places, to be constantly curious – and to be lucky.

“The decisive moment”

Cartier–Bresson “was there” all over the world for forty years. He started to take photographs in 1930 and officially stopped in the early 1970s to devote his time to drawing and painting, but he still continued to take some photographs until the end of his life.

In 1952 he published his first major book Images à la Sauvette (“Pictures on the Sly”). The American edition was entitled The Decisive Moment, and this term quickly came to be taken as a concept that described his approach to taking photographs – that there is a single moment when subject, time and place come together to be captured by the photographer in order to create the most meaningful image.

Publicly, Cartier–Bresson appeared to accept the term. But in 2003, in London for the launch of his last book, Cartier–Bresson wrote, unprompted, in my copy of The Decisive Moment which I had given him to sign: ce titre est ridicule et je n’y suis pour rien, HCB (“This title is ridiculous, and I am not responsible for it, HCB”).

Perhaps by the end of his life he had become impatient with a phrase, probably dreamed up by an editor at his American publishers, which too tritely summed up an approach to photography that was far deeper and more complicated than simply the seizing of a single moment.

Fortunately, while denying “the decisive moment” he has left us with his own more explicit statement of what he thought was essential to his photography: “For me photography is to place head and heart and eye along the same line of sight. It’s a way of life” (see Henri Cartier–Bresson, the man the image and the word, Thames & Hudson, 2003).

New York, 1935. Joe, a jazz trumpet player with his wife May. Copyright Magnum Photos

Earlier, in 1952, he wrote:

“through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us. . . . But this only takes care of the content of the picture. For me content cannot be separated from form. By form I mean the rigorous organization of the interplay of surfaces, lines and values . . . . In photography, visual organization can stem only from a developed instinct”.

This search to find the line of sight which joins judgment and feeling and thereby imbues the mechanical process of taking the photograph with a humanity, came from his highly–developed sensibility in choosing the subject and where and when to photograph it. It made him a master whose talent was recognised very early – his photographs were first exhibited at the Julian Levy Gallery in New York in 1932, only a year after he had started to take photographs seriously.

What kind of photographer?

And the person behind the camera? Cartier–Bresson came from a wealthy Norman family, his mother was a descendant of Charlotte Corday, the murderer of Jean–Paul Marat. This prosperous middle–class background gave him a self–confidence and an independence that meant that he always travelled his own intellectual and imaginative path. Many photographers have imitated Cartier–Bresson; Cartier–Bresson imitated no one.

He was not the first photographer to use the new Leica in the early 1930s to create the candid photograph. The German photographer Erich Salomon was the great Leica pioneer, though in 1929 – when the London Graphic had called Salomon’s photographs of world leaders in conference “candid camera” – he had used an Ermanox, a forerunner of the Leica.

Nor was Cartier–Bresson the first to take unposed photographs of people. The 17–year–old Jacques Henri Lartigue had set up his camera in the Bois de Boulogne in 1911 to photograph beautiful and fashionable women as they passed by. Trembling with excitement he would lie in wait for the “golden pheasant in the henhouse” ignoring the angry shout of the husband.

Cartier–Bresson describes the same visceral excitement of having a camera in his hands. “[The Leica] became the extension of my eye. I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung up and ready to pounce, determined to ‘trap’ life – to preserve life in the act of living. Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph”.

Not surprisingly, for a complicated, long–lived and intensely private man, there are other contradictions in the public perception of him and his work. He was reputed never to crop his images but to always print the whole negative. The photographer Eve Arnold, an old friend and colleague at the photographic agency Magnum, maintains that Cartier–Bresson would crop his photographs if it made a better image. What is more likely is that because of his acute sense of composition, and the fact that all his life he only worked with the 35mm format with its 1:1.5 proportions, he rarely needed to crop his photographs. Instinctively he made his images “fill the frame” in a way that satisfied him.

Then there is the question of whether he was a photojournalist or a documentary photographer. In Images a la Sauvette he writes of “our trade of photo–reporting” but tells Russell Miller, the historian of Magnum, “I am a very bad journalist, very, very bad”. He goes on to recount how he was photographing the Russian ballerina Svetlana Beriosova when he was introduced to the young Rudolf Nureyev who had just arrived from Russia, and never thought to photograph him.

At other times his reticence was to his advantage. Cartier–Bresson had been photographing Mahatma Gandhi on the day he was assassinated, 30 January 1948. On hearing the news he cycled from his hotel and fought his way through the hysterical crowds, but out of respect did not enter the room where Gandhi lay and took his photographs through the curtains. The famous American photographer Margaret Bourke–White followed him, forcing her way into the room; those present, deeply offended, tore the film from her camera. It was Cartier–Bresson’s photographs that were published in Life magazine.

The discipline of art

Cartier–Bresson had, with Robert Capa and George Rodger, founded the Magnum photographic agency the previous year. An almost ungovernable photographers’ cooperative, it has gone from crisis to crisis through its fifty–seven years and yet its members have included many of the greatest photographers of the second half of the 20th century.

Russell Miller recounts several Magnum anecdotes that illustrate Cartier–Bresson’s cantankerous humanity. On one occasion the Czech photographer Josef Koudelka arrived for a dinner at a smart London restaurant and was barred by the uniformed porter because of his tieless attire, combat jacket and baggy trousers. Cartier–Bresson burst out of the restaurant, grabbed the porter by the lapels and shouted at him: “He’s better dressed than you! Look at you, you’re dressed like a clown. If he can’t come in, I’m leaving!” – which they did.

As he entered his 90s Cartier–Bresson had to accept that documentary photography was changing. The English photographer Martin Parr was one of the most controversial members of Magnum. When Cartier–Bresson saw his photographs of tourists at an exhibition in Paris in 1995 he said to Parr, “I have only one thing to say to you. You are from a completely different planet to me”.

A nonplussed Parr later received a fax:

“Dear Martin Parr, Being an impulsive photographer I am sorry, it was only once in the street I realised how very much I over–reacted to your work, which was practically unknown to me . . . I want to confirm that I still think that you are from a different planet. And why not? Yours, HCB”.

His drawings and paintings were never as successful as his photographs. His drawing style was loose but rather fussy and lacked the clarity of vision of his photographs. Like Lartigue he was torn between photography and art. He wanted to do both but later in his career gave up photography in order to concentrate on drawing and painting. He described photography as a form of instant drawing and knew that the discipline of drawing had helped him to be a better photographer.

Cartier–Bresson’s photographs were widely published in magazines and in his many books, and exhibited across the world. Lincoln Kirstein, in the 1947 catalogue to the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, writes of “pictures which in their freshness, elegance and truth remain works of art within their own radical aesthetic”.

Over forty years on, as at an exhibition of portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in London, his work was still drawing large crowds. His photographs remain as arresting now as they were in the 1930s, and his unique, heartfelt “line of sight” has placed him squarely in the pantheon of the great photographers who have shown us what a magical instrument the camera can be.