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Henri Cartier-Bresson - Cameraman
From The Economist print edition Sep 1st 2005
Henri Cartier-Bresson: A Biography
By Pierre Assouline
HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON wanted to be famous on condition that he remain unknown. That contradiction is all too apparent in Pierre Assouline's biography of the French photographer—dubbed “the eye of the century”—published in English to coincide with a retrospective of Carter-Bresson's work in Edinburgh. Mr Assouline, who edits a French literary magazine, Lire, has based his book on a series of conversations and letters exchanged with Cartier-Bresson in the decade before his death in August last year at the age of 95. The old man would not hear of a biography, while knowing that Mr Assouline would disobey.
A key to Cartier-Bresson's ambivalence lies in his family background. Born the eldest son of rich yet austere cotton-thread manufacturers from Normandy, he was brought up to believe that there was something repugnant about seeking out the limelight. Trained as a painter, he was also embarrassed by money and class, though the way he spoke, “pronouncing words delicately from the tip of his tongue”, revealed rather more about his social origins than he might have wished.
The photographer combined a restless energy with a genius for composition. Truman Capote described the volatile Frenchman at work in New Orleans in the late 1940s as “dancing along the pavement like a frantic dragonfly...doing his clickety-clicks with a joyous intensity and religious fervour that filled his whole being.” But it was only at the age of 24, after seeing a lyrical picture by Martin Munkasci, a Hungarian photographer, of some naked African boys running into Lake Tanganyika, that he saw his future: “It is the only photograph that influenced me,” he would write towards the end of his life. “There is such intensity in this image, such joie de vivre.”
Mr Assouline crams his tribute with details and stories about the photographer who was present at some of the great upheavals of the 20th century: the Spanish civil war, the liberation of Paris in 1945, the fall of the Kuomintang in China to the communists and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, along with his friendships, among others, with Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti and Jean Renoir.
Mr Assouline's introduction is titled “hero and friend”, and his book suffers to a degree from an obeisance to its subject that is quite un-Anglo-Saxon. A photographer who loathed being photographed, Cartier-Bresson believed that what went on beneath the surface was nobody's business but his own. He liked to recall how he once told secrets he had never confided to anyone before to a Paris taxi driver, certain that he would never see the man again. Cartier-Bresson unveiled no such secrets to his biographer, who was happy to respect the privacy of the photographer's private life as the price he had to pay for writing about his hero. The result is polite, but too paltry to be truly pleasing.
Henri Cartier-Bresson: A Biography
By Pierre Assouline
Thames & Hudson; 386 pages; $34.95 and £20
