Born Henri Cartier-Bresson

[Mark]

Today, August 22, was born one of the most stunning photo artists, the great founder of modern photojournalism, Henri Cartier-Bresson.

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Henry was born in 1908. From early youth he was interested in painting. In the art world Henry introduced his uncle Louis. When Cartier-Bresson was seven, my uncle died, but his advice the next photographer followed all his life.

Cartier-Bresson studied painting and graphic art in the atelier of the famous artist Andre Lot. In 1930 he traveled to Africa. That is what turned his life - his return to France in 1932, he decided to take a photograph. He was very inspired by photographs of Eugene Atget, André Kertész, and Martin Munkachi made in Africa. Henry bought a legendary camera Leica.

The first serious test of professional and life happened to Cartier-Bresson in 1939. Then he became a corporal in the army kinofotopodrazdelenii. When the Nazis invaded France, a young photographer captured. Three times he tried to escape. The third attempt succeeded. Returning to France, Cartier-Bresson became an active member of the Resistance. However, he still managed to record everything that happens in their occupied country in the film. It was he who encouraged and organized by the French photographers to shoot the occupation, and then retreat fascists.

After the war, in 1947, Cartier-Bresson with his colleagues Robert Kapa, Maria Eisner, Rita Andivert, Bill Vandivartom and George Roger founded the community of photojournalists, which eventually became the most elite clippings in the world - Magnum Photos.

For Magnum took off and remove the greatest photographers of his time. From Cartier-Bresson worked, Elliot Erwitt, Josef Koudelka, Philip Helsman, Larry Tauell and many others. In 1988, the selection of Magnum passed and our compatriot George Pinhassov.

During his life, Cartier-Bresson wrote many books. One of them is called the "decisive moment". That Henry has introduced this concept in turnover - he explained how important the very moment of the shooting. Master said:

Photo by itself does not interest me. I just want to grab a piece of reality.

Cartier-Bresson was convinced that the mission ends with the photographer clicked the shutter - it has never worked in the laboratory, not involved in film development and even framing:

I hate to manipulate - not during shooting or after, in a dark room. Good eye always notice such manipulations ... The only point of art - it is one hundred and twenty fifth of a second when the shutter clicks, the camera flashes in the light and movement stops.

That is why all the pictures of Cartier-Bresson - the most realistic reflection of the time.

Henry took off in the USSR. He has twice been in our country - just after Stalin, in 1954, and 1972-m. Photo taken during these visits, in the new millennium has already been exhibited in Moscow - at the Biennale 2000. The maestro himself selected the images for the exhibition.

The biggest challenge for myself Cartier-Bresson believed portrait. Nevertheless, his hands belong to the set of photos of the legendary characters of the XX century. He was shot by Jean-Paul Sartre, Marilyn Monroe, Coco Chanel and many others. At the same time, Henry never shirked production. All of his work - reportage.

Henri Cartier-Bresson lived a long, bright and happy life. He was twice married, he has a daughter, Melanie. Great photographer died in August 2004, th.

Source: http://spletnik.ru/calendar/14604-ka...e-bresson.html

Many pics here: http://www.magnumphotos.com/Archive/...m&CT=Album

If, at the time machine you sit down and pull off

[Вивьен]

It is like the first four pictures presented below. On the fifth, the last look hard. Others, in the spirit of the fifth, which depicts children from different countries, did not even have the courage to open fully.

[Кирилл Сызранский]

The world in all its manifestations


In opened in New York presented a retrospective exhibition of works have traveled the world the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson

essay

Very few people define "world citizen" is more appropriate than the multitudinous photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, wonderful and great - although, of course, still not great - a retrospective held in New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Most of his long career, photojournalist, started in the 30 years and officially completed in 2004, Cartier-Bresson spent constantly moving around the world. If the cause of his routes on a map, you get bizarre, twisting and interlacing lines, along which he moved on planes, trains, buses, bicycles, rickshaws, horse and foot.

In addition to its extraordinary mobility of Cartier-Bresson differed incredible number of dating and relationships. The possessor of a pleasant appearance, who grew up in a big city in a wealthy bourgeois family, he easily struck up acquaintances and maintained friendly relations with the political and cultural beau monde of the time. He posed for Nehru and Matisse, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Thomas Eliot, Truman Capote and George Balanchine, Coco Chanel and Alberto Giacometti.

And third - most important - a permanent mark of the life of Cartier-Bresson was, of course, his camera: most of all he liked to fit in your hand, graceful and smooth, like a pistol, a Leica. His creative method sets the tone he created the genre of modern photojournalism. No less an impact on contemporary photography and has his way of approaching the moment of capture: suggestive of Zen alloy heightened attention and patience that allowed him to merge with the unfolding events, and dissolve in it.

Some of these events were small and pleasant: cuddling lovers, rode past on a bicycle child. Others have been gigantic. In 1945, immediately after the Second World War, Cartier-Bresson shot Germany (before that he spent three years in a German POW camp). In 1948, in Shanghai, he was photographed as a crowd of robbing banks in the last hours before the entry into the city of the communist army. He took off the end of British rule in India. He photographed Gandhi just before his assassination, and after pictures of his funeral.

Many of these photos can now be seen in the Museum of Modern Art in fragmented into 13 thematic sections of the retrospective exhibition "Henri Cartier-Bresson: age of modernity.

Sections made without compliance with the chronology, but one of the very first, where collected photos taken in the 30 years, but later saw the light of all the others.

Then, in the 30's, the photographer was twenty years old. He grew up in Paris, and dreamed of becoming an artist. He studied painting with the artist, who worked in the style of late Cubism, but was friends with surrealist Andre Breton circle, absorbing the left-wing political views and unorthodox aesthetic presentation.

In 1930, he was disappointed in the career of the painter and took up a camera. One of the earliest retrospective presented at the photos - made in 1932, shot a man lying unconscious on the Paris street - can be considered an experiment, made the beginning of street photography. There is no doubt influence exerted on the photographer surrealism: photos of dazzling white light area and the factory walls are surprisingly similar to the painting by Giorgio de Chirico.

Seeing in 1930 pictures taken by his senior colleague, Martin Munkashi (1896-1963) in Africa, Cartier-Bresson himself went there shortly. In the mid 30's he returned from Africa to France and sent to Italy, Spain, Mexico and the United States. To this period belong many of his most famous works: looking out the narrow windows of a prostitute in Mexico, frozen in a burst of ecstatic Spanish boy (looking at this moment behind the scenes thrown up a ball), four sturdy French, situated on a picnic on the riverbank.

His work was exhibited in galleries, although he had already realized that making art is not for the galleries. He insisted that all involved are not art. What then were his pictures? Without a doubt, something ephemeral and not exclusive, but intended for mass circulation, and practical use. With incredible skill set scene Picnic intended for use in a public campaign for a shorter working day.

In each of the departments of retrospective presents works from various periods, and therefore a sharp contrast between early and late period of the artist does not arise.

What is missing on the show? Condensed voltage. It is present in the individual images: a pulsed photo of 1946, which is embodied by the first meeting after a long separation of mother and son at a New York pier, and the ashen palette opens an exhibition funeral photos shot in 1962 in Paris demonstrators protesting against the war in Algeria. But on the whole exhibition creates a surprisingly weak sense of tension.

Capacious, grasping current look and a keen sense of elation life has always been - and remain! - Characteristics of creativity of Cartier-Bresson. The exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art it so much that it seems it does not exist anywhere else. However, even elude our gaze, the photographer still held out to us here in my hand the whole world.
Holland Cotter
The New York Times (23.04.2010)

1. The picture in 1972 Georgian family at a picnic near the medieval monastery. A series of photographs taken during a trip to the Soviet Union.
2. In a photograph taken in 1950 in Cairo, the woman brings food cotton mill workers.

http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2010...imes15/14.html