INSPIRATION: I was very lucky to be taken to the orginal printer who worked with Henri Cartier-Bresson studio when I was in Paris last by a very dear friend. Walking into his studio I saw the orginal prints by the great master hanging on the walls. Totally mezerising as one of the locations he shot of people sitting having a picnic was not far from where the studio was. We visited the spot and shutting my eyes I could see the image so well in my minds eye. I love his candid shots of street life, magic moments he captured throughout his work. A wizard with the camera. His work helps feed my obsession Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup-en-Brie, Seine-et-Marne, France, the oldest of five children. His father was a wealthy textile manufacturer, whose Cartier-Bresson thread was a staple of French sewing kits. His mothers family were cotton merchants and landowners from Normandy, where he spent part of his childhood. The Cartier-Bresson family lived in a bourgeois neighborhood in Paris, near Place de lEurope. His parents were able to provide him with financial support to develop his interests in photography in a more independent manner than many of his contemporaries. Cartier-Bresson also sketched in his spare time. Photography is not like painting, Cartier-Bresson told the Washington Post in 1957. There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative, he said. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever. . Cartier-Bresson almost exclusively used Leica 35 mm rangefinder cameras equipped with normal 50 mm lenses or occasionally a wide-angle for landscapes.[13] He often wrapped black tape around the cameras chrome body to make it less conspicuous. With fast black and white films and sharp lenses, he was able to photograph almost by stealth to capture the events. No longer bound by a huge 4×5 press camera or an awkward medium format twin-lens reflex camera, miniature-format cameras gave Cartier-Bresson what he called the velvet hand [and] the hawks eye.[citation needed] He never photographed with flash, a practice he saw as [i]mpolite...like coming to a concert with a pistol in your hand.[13] 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.[1] Indeed, he emphasized that his prints were not cropped by insisting they include the first millimetre or so of the unexposed clear negative around the image area resulting, after printing, in a black border around the positive image. 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 worlds most unassuming personalities. He disliked publicity and exhibited a ferocious shyness since his days in hiding from the Nazis during World War II. Although he took many famous portraits, his own face was little known to the world at large (which presumably had the advantage of allowing him to work on the street in peace). He dismissed others applications of the term art to his photographs, which he thought were merely his gut reactions to moments in time 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
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 18:59:34 +0000
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