Henri Cartier-Bresson

Dorgali. Photograph by Henri Cartier Bresson, 1962

Born into an upper-middle-class family, Henri Cartier-Bresson (Chanteloup, 1908 – Montjustin, 2004) became interested in art at a very young age, attending the studio of the painter Jacques-Emile Blanche and coming into contact with Surrealist circles. Between 1927 and 1928 he was a pupil of André Lhote, painter and theorist of Cubism. At the end of the 1920s he left for the Ivory Coast, where he took his first photographs. In 1931, in Marseille, he had the opportunity to see several photographs by Martin Munkacsi, which impressed him so deeply that he decided to take up photography. He bought his first Leica – a small, discreet 35 mm camera – and set off with some friends on a long journey through Europe, during which he reached Italy for the first time. Shortly afterwards he went to the United States, where he exhibited with Walker Evans at the Julian Levy Gallery in New York. In 1933 he went to Mexico as part of an ethnographic expedition: he exhibited his work at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, together with Manuel Alvarez Bravo. He studied cinema with Paul Strand and became assistant director to Jean Renoir. During the Spanish Civil War he made a documentary on the hospitals of Republican Spain and another for the Red Cross. Back in France, he published his photographs in Ce soir, a pro-communist newspaper directed by Louis Aragon. In 1937 he married the Javanese dancer Ratna Mohini. He was a prisoner of the Nazis from 1940 to 1943; after several attempts he managed to escape and joined the French Resistance. Returning to Paris, he photographed the liberation of the city. He later collaborated on a documentary about the return of prisoners of war, produced by the American army, portraying the artists Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Bonnard, Claudel and Rouault. Between 1946 and 1947 he worked in the United States and collaborated with Harper's Bazaar magazine.

In April 1947, together with Robert Capa, David Seymour (Chim), George Rodger, William and Rita Vandivert, he founded Magnum Photos, the first photographic agency in the world.

Between 1948 and 1950 he lived and worked in the Far East: India, Pakistan, China and Indochina. He photographed Gandhi half an hour before his assassination, the birth of the People's Republic of China and of the Indonesian Republic, reports that would be published by Paris Match. In 1952, thanks to his friend and publisher Tériade, he published his first photographic book, Images à la sauvette, with a cover by Matisse and containing a text entitled The Decisive Moment, in which he set out one of his many theoretical reflections on photography. Three years later, the same publisher would publish Les Européens, with a cover by Mirò.

Between 1951 and 1973 he made numerous trips to Italy. In the summer of 1962, the international magazine Vogue commissioned him to produce a reportage on Sardinia, where he spent about twenty days. He photographed people discreetly and without forcing the scene, preferring the places of tradition to the emerging and elitist Costa Smeralda: Mamoiada, San Leonardo di Siete Fuentes, Orosei, Cala Gonone, Orgosolo, Orani – as a guest of his friend Costantino Nivola –, Desulo, Oliena, Nuoro and Cagliari.

After a brief period spent in China, in 1963 he left for Cuba at the invitation of the American magazine Life. In the following years he continued to travel: India, Japan, Mexico, Canada, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and his work was regularly published in Life and Paris Match. In 1966 he definitively left Magnum, which nevertheless retained ownership of his images. In 1967 he separated from his first wife and some time later married Martine Franck, a Magnum reporter, with whom he would have a daughter, Mélanie. From the 1970s onwards he devoted himself to drawing, reserving his photographs almost exclusively for family and friends; editorial production on his work intensified and a series of retrospective exhibitions was organized, travelling around the world. In 2000, together with his daughter and his wife, he inaugurated the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Bibliography

I grandi reporter della Magnum in Sardegna. Nuoro, Ilisso, 2017.

Update

8/9/2026 - 15:45