Henri Cartier-Bresson (French: August 22, 1908 – August 3, 2004) was a French photographer considered the master of candid photography, and an early user of 35 mm film. He helped develop street photography, and approvingly cited a notion of the inevitability of a decisive moment, a term adopted as the title for his first major book. His work has influenced many photographers.
Cartier-Bresson nearly always used a Leica 35 mm rangefinder camera fitted with a normal 50 mm lens, or occasionally a wide-angle lens for landscapes. He often wrapped black tape around the camera’s chrome body to make it less conspicuous. With fast black and white film and sharp lenses, he was able to photograph events unnoticed. No longer bound by a 4×5 press camera or an medium format twin-lens reflex camera, miniature-format cameras gave Cartier-Bresson what he called “the velvet hand…the hawk’s eye.”
He never photographed with flash, a practice he saw as “[impolite…like coming to a concert with a pistol in your hand.”
He believed in composing his photographs in the viewfinder, not in the darkroom. He showcased this belief by having nearly all his photographs printed only at full-frame and completely free of any cropping or other darkroom manipulation. He insisted that his prints were not cropped as they include the first few millimeters of the unexposed negative around the image area, resulting in a black frame around the developed picture.
Cartier-Bresson worked exclusively in black and white, other than a few unsuccessful attempts in color. He disliked developing or making his own prints and showed a considerable lack of interest in the process of photography in general, likening photography with the small camera to an “instant drawing”. Technical aspects of photography were valid for him only where they allowed him to express what he saw:
Constant new discoveries in chemistry and optics are widening considerably our field of action. It is up to us to apply them to our technique, to improve ourselves, but there is a whole group of fetishes which have developed on the subject of technique. Technique is important only insofar as you must master it in order to communicate what you see… The camera for us is a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy. In the precise functioning of the mechanical object perhaps there is an unconscious compensation for the anxieties and uncertainties of daily endeavor. In any case, people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.
—Henri Cartier-Bresson
He started a tradition of testing new camera lenses by taking photographs of ducks in urban parks. He never published the images but referred to them as ‘my only superstition’ as he considered it a ‘baptism’ of the lens.
Cartier-Bresson is regarded as one of the art world’s most unassuming personalities. He disliked publicity and exhibited a ferocious shyness since his days of hiding from the Nazis during World War II. Although he took many famous portraits, his face was little known to the world at large. This, presumably, helped allow him to work on the street undisturbed. He denied that the term “art” applied his photographs. Instead, he thought that they were merely his gut reactions to fleeting situations that he had happened upon.
In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotiv.
—Henri Cartier-Bresson