Henri Cartier-Bresson


He died yesterday. The first time I heard that name I was twenty, and was learning photography. Without really understanding what made him such a great photographer, I was imitating Cartier-Bresson, trying to capture the moment of suspended tension framed inside interesting composition.





I learned photography through a mentor called "Spider Man," when I was with Armed Forces Radio and Television in Tokyo. His real name was Bud Boyd.

He was a black man who was very tall and skinny, and impossibly shy. He was so shy around other people he would hold his hand up in front of his face when he talked. And because he was so tall, I guess, he would lean down like he was walking under a low portal all the time. At first I went along with the other men, dismissing him as an oddball. Then I saw his pictures.

His walls were covered with photographs unlike anything I'd ever seen. He was a real artist. I began to observe him objectively and realized he shielded his face because he smoked cigarettes all the time, and was self conscious about it.

He was self-conscious about almost everything, but I was one of those young guys who had enough personality and enthusiasm to blast on through any self-consciousness as a joke. "Damn, Bud, you smell like rancid tobacco."




He had been to Brooks Institute of Photography, a really good school. He was the only guy on the base who could fix the television cameras if something happened to them, and so he did pretty much as he pleased, printing pictures all night and sleeping until ten or so, dropping in to the television studio about noon.

When I showed an interest in photography, he gave me a 35mm camera to take out and shoot a role of film with. Then he showed me how to develop the film and print the pictures. I was hooked. I spent that year shooting high speed Tri-X film pushed upward from 1000 ASA. I learned which lens to use to compress things and which would accentuate the foreground, how to use motion, blur the background, and shoot with almost no light.




Part of his teaching me photography was showing me the photographs of Cartier-Bresson, the artist who used the 35mm camera to escape from the posed picture, photography as documentation.




He showed me how Cartier-Bresson brought photography to the burning edge of the moment. The French master was skilled in art and so understood how to compose through the lens of his Leica. He captured the moment of suspended tension, so that his work transcended anything photography had been before.





Cartier-Bresson caught people in the unguarded moment, stopped time, gave us a look behind the formal portrait, at what we look like in unguarded moments. He showed us what was behind the half-closed door, what was taking place during that moment when we might look away.





Bud must have been a good teacher because when I got out of the Navy my first job was as a newspaper photographer, and I spent many nights printing pictures in my darkroom, the night slipping away into dawn before I realized it.

And always I remembered Cartier-Bresson, because of the reverence Bud had for his work. I didn't understand it. But I understood that he was one of the masters. He was one of the men who defined his time, and now that time has stopped.

I remember Don Juan relating that he saw his son die during the construction of the Pan American highway. He was crushed by a boulder. "I shifted to seeing," he said, "and I saw his personal life expand out of control."

Cartier Bresson's personal life has expanded out of its container. But his creative genius remains alive.




(All the photos except the Blues Brothers one are by Cartier-Bresson, this last one is a portrait of Camus)

Posted: Wed - August 4, 2004 at 08:14 PM