Henri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson was born August 22, 1908 in France and is the oldest of five children. His father is a wealthy textile manufacturer of the Cartier-Bresson sewing kit, and his mother came from a line of cotton merchants. When he was young, he was originally interested in music, as well as several different kinds of art including painting, sketching, and photography. He was introduced the art of oil painting by his Uncle Louis, who unfortunately died in World War I, so he could no longer teach young Henri. He attended the private art school of André Lhote, who he refers to his teacher of photography without a camera. Although aspects of this schooling irritated him, his intense training would later help him with his problem solving and compositions for his photographs. In 1929, Henri Cartier-Bresson met Harry Crosby at Le Bourget who would eventually give Cartier-Bresson his first camera.
His parents would eventually support him financially so that he can focus on his photography. He originally worked with a Box Brownie camera, but he also experiments with a 3x4 viewfinder camera. He is recognized as a French humanist photographer as well as the master of candid photography. One of his most revolutionary techniques was his ability to implement the “decisive moment”. The decisive moment is the ability to almost predict what is going to happen based on your surroundings, set up the camera, and make the decision to take the photograph in a manner of mere seconds. The most well known image illustrating the decisive moment is his photograph titled Behind the Gare St. Lazare.
Galassi, Peter, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Work. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1987.
Newman, Emily. "Postwar Photography." Lecture, History of Modern Art (class), Art 111, Commerce, TX, April 28, 2016.
No comments:
Post a Comment