Cartier-Bresson, master photographer, dies at 95

Captured through the lens of Henri Cartier-Bresson's 35-millimeter Leica, a photograph was never merely just a picture of a bicycle passing a spiral staircase, or a boy toting wine bottles down a street. It was an instant of serendipity, when subject, geometry, and motion aligned as they never would again. The French photographer, who died last week at 95, always sought that "decisive moment," whether it was in a refugee camp in India, at a picnic in France, or by a rural road in the American South. In doing so, he created many of the 20th century's most important and enduring images.
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"He was taking the ordinary and making it exceptional simply by using ordinariness," says Larry Towell, a photographer with Magnum, the photo agency Cartier-Bresson cofounded in 1947 that remains one of the top agencies today. Legions of photojournalists, like Towell, were inspired to follow his lead. When Elliott Erwitt joined Magnum in 1953, he told Cartier-Bresson that the reason he first picked up a camera was Behind the Gare St. Lazare, his now iconic vision of a shadowy figure leaping across a puddle. Erwitt's new mentor gave him a print of the piece with a dedication that still serves as inspiration. "He's our spiritual father--he's the pope," Erwitt says. "We learned his discipline, his way of seeing, his lifestyle."

That lifestyle required traipsing about the globe, ever mindful of every detail while blending in unobtrusively (he even taped over the metal parts of his camera to hide its shine). Once, Erwitt and Cartier-Bresson ended up in Rome together. "We met up with this movie director--Fellini--and went to a rough-cut screening of La Dolce Vita," he says. "That's the thing about photographers. You land in situations other people do not." Cartier-Bresson often purposely put himself in those places, as when he joined up with the French Army's Film and Video Unit in 1940. Captured by the Germans, he spent 35 months as a prisoner of war before escaping. Luck would play a role, too: He found himself in Delhi snapping Mahatma Gandhi just 15 minutes before the leader was assassinated.

Many other celebrities served as his subjects--Truman Capote, Che Guevara, Marilyn Monroe, William Faulkner, the Dalai Lama--but as in the rest of his work, they were never formally posed. He captured Martin Luther King Jr. hunched over a desk of papers with a palm slapped over his forehead and Henri Matisse surrounded by birds as he sketched at home.

It was an astounding body of work. And yet, in 1966, Cartier-Bresson quit Magnum. He would return to his early love: painting and drawing. His camera emerged rarely in the last years of his life; instead, he sketched figures and landscapes. When his friends from Magnum stopped by to visit, he would shy away from discussing his earlier career. But even if Cartier-Bresson was uncomfortable discussing his photographic legacy, the art world is not. As Erwitt says: "He can only get better with age. People's clothes change, automobiles change, but the eye and the emotion, that doesn't change." In other words, even though one of photography's greatest masters is gone, the decisive moments he fixed on film aren't going anywhere.

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