This post is about Henri Cartier Bresson who is a famous photographer and one of the founders of the Magnum Photos. Let’s take a journey together to the story of Bresson, who has made a distinguished name for himself with his versatile artist personality and especially his documentaries.

 

Henri Cartier Bresson

 

Henri Cartier Bresson was born on August 22, 1908 in Seine-et-Marne, Chanteloup. He grew up in a very wealthy and cultured family. His father was a successful and well-known textile manufacturer. His mother came from a family of Normandy cotton merchants and a large landowner.

He met painting at a young age in the studio of his uncle Louis, who is a painter; “Painting has been an obsession for me ever since the day I was taken to my uncle’s studio, when I was five years old, during the Christmas holiday in 1913. I met the painting atmosphere for the first time there, inhaled the smell of paint.” Uncle Louis showed Henri to paint for a short time. He also got his first camera, Box Brownie, which he photographed on weekend holidays, at a young age. Bresson lost his uncle in World War I. 

Henri was sent to Paris to study. He attended Lycée Condorcet, whose previous alumni included celebrities such as Marcel Proust and André Malraux. However, Bresson failed to finish the school. While continuing his education, he also took painting lessons from family friends Jean Cottenet and famous portrait painter Jacques-Emile Blanche.

 

The years in Lhote’s Academy

 

In 1927, at the age of 19, he entered the academy of the cubist painter and sculptor André Lhote. Through his teachers, he had the opportunity to meet many artists such as Gertrude Stein, Rene Crevel (surrealist writer), Max Jacob (Poet), Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau and Max Ernst. He also read many important philosophers and writers such as Dostoevsky, Thomas Hardy, Arthur Rimbaud, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Engels and Marx.

Lhote’s passion was to combine cubism’s understanding of reality with classical artistic forms. He tried to relate Poussin and David’s French classical tradition with modernism. While Lhoto took his students to the Louvre for classical arts studies, he was also touring Paris’s important galleries for contemporary arts. Henri’s interest in modern arts was compounded by his admiration for the great masters of the renaissance such as Jan Van Eyck, Paolo Uccello, Masaccio and Piero della Francesca. For Bresson, Lhoto was his teacher, who taught him his first photography lessons without using a camera.

While Henri was attending Lhoto’s academy on the one hand, he also started going to the cafes where the surrealists went on those days. This trend was born in the interwar period, affected by Dadaism. Surrealism was an oppositional trend, although not as much as Dadaism. In 1924, the most important voice of the movement, poet and critic Andre Breton, published the surrealist manifesto. Surrealism, according to Breton, is a means of powerfully reuniting the conscious and unconscious domains of experience. Thus, the world of dreams and fantasy merges with the rational world in which daily life lives “in an absolute reality, in surreality”.

Breton was a left-wing writer who became a member of the communist party in the 1920s and then left the party, being contrary to Stalin’s rule. He believed that creative art must challenge all forms of bourgeois authority. These revolutionary concepts deeply affected the young people of surrealism, including Bresson. In a later interview, Bresson says; “It was not the surrealist painting that affected me, but rather Breton’s concepts. It was the role of spontaneous expression and intuition that satisfied me, it was above all rebellion, in art and life.”

Bresson had matured intellectually in the political and cultural sphere that he was in. He could not exhibit his artistic creativity in painting, which would express his theoretical and conceptual point. His first attempts were disappointing and he destroyed many of his early works.

 

Bresson’s impressive story will continue on the next post…

 

Anıl Uzun 

 

Note: In this blog post, I get help from the famous book of Russell Miller and the website of The International Center of Photography (ICP). If you want to take a look here is the info; Miller, Russell. Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History, Grove Pres, New York, 1997. ICP: www.icp.org.