The decisive moment made street photography a craft
Henri Cartier-Bresson, 22 August 1908 to 3 August 2004, mastered candid 35mm seeing and helped invent modern street photography. A Magnum Photos co-founder in 1947, he mostly quit the camera for painting in the 1970s after decades chasing split-second geometry.
Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup-en-Brie, east of Paris, into money: his father's firm made the Cartier-Bresson thread found in French sewing boxes, and his mother descended from Charlotte Corday. The family lived near Parc Monceau, the children addressed their parents with the formal vous, and his father assumed Henri would join the business, a prospect the boy dreaded. Family wealth let him chase photography with more freedom than most of his generation. As a child he shot holiday snaps on a Box Brownie, and his uncle Louis, a Prix de Rome winner in 1910, taught him oil painting until he was killed in the First World War.
In 1927 he enrolled at the Paris studio of the Cubist Andre Lhote, who wanted to marry modernism to the classical line of Poussin and David and marched students round the Louvre. Cartier-Bresson later called Lhote his teacher of photography without a camera, though he chafed at the rules. He also fell in with the Surrealists at the Cafe Cyrano, then spent 1928 to 1929 studying art, literature and English at Cambridge, emerging bilingual.
Conscripted in 1930 and posted to Le Bourget, he was confined for hunting without a licence until the American expatriate Harry Crosby vouched for him and gave him his first camera. After a painful affair with Caresse Crosby ended in 1931, he fled to the Ivory Coast, lived by shooting game, and nearly died of blackwater fever; the stalking habits he learned there later shaped how he worked with a lens.
Recovering in Marseille in late 1931, he saw Martin Munkacsi's 1930 image of three boys racing into Lake Tanganyika and decided to give up painting for photography. He bought a Leica with a 50 mm lens and blacked out its shiny parts so people would not notice it. In 1947 he helped found Magnum Photos, and by the 1970s he had mostly set the camera aside to paint again. He died in August 2004.
Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson
