May, 1992

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON: A Life of Fleeting Moments

PARIS. Raining. Its 10.20 in the morning and Henri Cartier-Bresson is 20 minutes late. I consult a waiter in bad French. “C’est Cafe Carousel ici, n’est-ce pas?”

“Oui, monsieur.”

A clear-eyed Frenchman, one of only two other people in the cafe and holding a grubby knapsack adorned with protest buttons – Nuclear? Non merci!” – looks up from his booth across the room. “Do you need help?” he asks, in English.

“No thank you, I’m waiting for someone.”

“Are you Australian?”

“Yes.”

“I am waiting for an Australian. You might be him.”

And thus begins one of only a handful of formal interviews ever given by the world’s greatest photographer.

Henri Cartier-Bresson wasn’t late. In fact, he’d been waiting in the cafe for at least 20 minutes, he said, but no-one had noticed him come in, me or the sharp-eyed waiter. He’d just slipped in, unnoticed, unobtrusive. Just as he had in 1947 when he photographed Mahatma Ghandi and Nehru and later in China around Chairman Mao Zedong. And just as he has in an extraordinary career that has “stolen” (his word) 60 of his 82 years.

“In order to observe, one must be unobtrusive and able to pass by by unnoticed,” he tells me. “This is my great quality.” This dictum has dominated his life, his career and, at 82, has prepared him for immortality.

This interview, a year in the planning, persuading and execution, was to be conducted on the express condition that he would not be photographed. Not even his wizened rock-steady hands. Particularly not those famous hands. Taping, too, was out. So was a notebook though this stricture was later reluctantly relaxed. One of the world’s best-known chroniclers didn't want any record of himself. It was conversation only.

“Why? Because it does not truly reflect what is happening here between us,” he elliptically offers.

“This is journalism. Journalism is not real. It cannot truly tell what someone is like, what went on here today. I do not want journalism.”

“I just want to talk.”

Talking with Cartier-Bresson, one is struck by his ordinariness. An ordinary, extraordinary man. Short, bald save for fine, grandfatherly white cover around the ears, wire-rimmed spectacles, an unassuming man in a white parka.

Perhaps one is expecting too much. Should a contemporary of Sartre, de Beauvoir, Jean Renoir and Colette be expected to burst forth profundities refined by decades of Parisian café au lait. The Meaning of Life at 100 ASA?

Yet this is also the man, a friend and confidante of kings and presidents who armed with trusty Leica virtually invented modern photo-journalism - an accolade, by the way, he denies.

Is it right the sum of such experiences be reduced to a mere “I have never worked. I’ve just had a good time.” Is that the laughter of high irony one hears from behind his hand? “People - they have made too much of me. To be so well-known, I find its very embarrassing.  I don’t want to be famous. To be a famous photographer is…..abominable.”

Magnum, the photographic agency that he, Robert Capa, David Seymour (Chim) and George Rodger founded in New York and Paris in 1947, had warned that Cartier-Bresson had a volatile temper. He was a charming yet irascible old man, they said, liable to walk out of an interview at the slightest provocation.

Perhaps the years have mellowed Cartier-Bresson. He was none of these. The only hint of dissent was a smiling threat to walk out if one continued badgering for facts. “You ask too many questions about me,” he complains.

“No-one is interested in me. I have done nothing. I am not interesting.”

“Then why I am here?” I ask.

“Because you reflect the international falsehood that I am famous.”

THERE is a strong argument to suggest that the development of illustrated magazines, not unlike this one, can be traced to the humble cotton thread for it was on the back of his family’s textile fortune that Cartier-Bresson was able to finance his early photographic assignments in the 1930’s.

These were the early days of “lifestyle” magazines. Life, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar all offered alternatives to the monopolies of American press barons like William Randolph Hearst, and it was in these titles that Cartier-Bresson’s pioneering work in West Africa, Latin America and Asia was first published.

Peter Ride of the respected London Photographer’s Gallery, says Cartier-Bresson was a trailblazer for photographer-artists who wanted to do something different but were restricted “to the formula of the mass media of the time, which was fairly dire.”

Says Ride, “there was a time in the 30’s when he was assigned to shoot a coronation in London but instead he shot the spectators and their reactions. This might seem quite commonplace now but at the time it broke radical ground.”

CARTIER-BRESSON sees it differently. “I wanted adventure. I wanted to see the world and how it really lived. I don’t like travel. I like to live in a place, to take the blood pulse of a country.”

“I can remember being in China on a railway platform, standing there with a crowd of other Chinese looking at this strange beast who had just arrived by train. It was a foreigner just like me but they, the Chinese, did not even notice that I was also a foreigner and neither did I. I took that as a great compliment. I was just standing there in the moment’s fascination like everyone else, just looking.”

Cartier-Bresson got his first real break in 1934 when he was invited to Mexico to shoot a surveying expedition. But the mission failed and he was stranded, broke, in Mexico City. Still, it was a fascinating time to be in Mexico, a country learning nationhood after the 1911 Revolution and developing its own intellectual culture. He fell in with a circle that included such figures as muralist Diego Rivera and his partner Freda Kahlo, the French surrealist Andre Bruton and even Leon Trotsky who had sought refuge there after Stalin’s purge (and was later famously murdered there by Stalin’s agents in his bed). The young Henri was soon selling photographs to Mexican newspapers and arranging his first exhibition.

The photographs were of poor, ordinary folk and set a theme that has marked his career - exploiting the rich West’s fascination with the poor but exotic developing world.

He had begun to build a following, exhibiting in New York and Madrid after Mexico. But on his return to Paris, he decided to virtually abandon photography to understudy the famous French film director Jean Renoir. War intervened, and then came the German occupation of France.

In 1939, he joined the French Army and was to spend the next three years as a German prisoner of war. He attempted escape three times before succeeding on the fourth, making it back to occupied Paris, photography and a senior role in the French Resistance. The war still brings back bitter memories and even today he finds it difficult to reconcile with Germans his own age. (It also made him a committed pacifist and today he votes Green and belongs to Amnesty International.)

In 1947, came Magnum, the photographer’s co-operative that would change the way the world looked at itself. “We all wanted jobs but not the responsibility of work; circumstances conspired to bring us together,” he remembers. “We made a very good living but we were always on the verge on bankruptcy.”

The Magnum phenomenon should not be under-estimated in the evolution of photojournalism, or of photography itself. Magnum photographers, armed with their beloved German-built Leicas - the world’s first 35mm cameras and the inspiration for the Nikons and Canons that define commercial photography today - brought the world into suburban living rooms with the drama and gravitas that television would refine decades later.

The postwar period was an extraordinary one for news, and Cartier-Bresson spent many of those years in Asia witnessing the collapse of Western colonialism and influence and the rise of new nations. It is during these tumultuous years that the great body of his more journalistic reportage was gathered.

His India is captured in memorable images of the retreating British Raj and the ascendant Nehru, the tragedy of Partition and of Mahatma Gandhi, whom he was famously with just minutes before his 1948 assassination. (His famous shot showing India’s last British Viceroy, Mountbatten on the steps of Government House in Delhi, oblivious to an intimate private joke Nehru and Mountbatten’s redoubtable wife, Edwina, were sharing next to him, caused an international stir and gave rise to enduring gossip that Nehru and Edwina were having an affair.)

In China, he photographed the euphoria of Mao’s victorious Communists, and the hope and puzzlement of the people they had supposedly emancipated, while in Indonesia (HCB’s first wife, Ratna, was Javanese) he recorded the triumphant overthrow of the Dutch imperial yoke. His Magnum career lasted until 1966 and took him to pre-and-post-revolution Cuba, the Soviet Union, North America and Japan and won him the coveted Overseas Press Club of America Award a record four times.

“This was nor reportage,” he says of his career. “I was just taking pictures of people. In that sense I was a journalist, taking a journal with my camera. But that picture with Nehru, he was just a person, an image; it could have been anyone.”

IN 1952, a book was published that would change the way critics viewed the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. As Cartier-Bresson himself sarcastically tells it, the book also changed the way he regarded critics, although it has contributed to the mystique and the avant-garde image cultivated by modern-day yuppy collectors of his prints.

Images a la Sauvette was the first comprehensive compilation of Cartier’s best work. The book’s English title, The Decisive Moment, suggested to his enthusiasts that Cartier-Bresson possessed some mystical anticipation of events and was thus able to capture the “inner truth” of what was really going on. The Nehru-Mountbatten image was a classic example - the last imperial Viceroy pompously proclaiming a moment of huge national significance to the emergent India and Pakistan while, in the background, Nehru and Edwina stealing the scene with what seems the unguarded intimacy of lovers.

Critics had a field day with the book. Reams of pretentious copy poured forth on both sides of the Atlantic. Researchers dug deep into Cartier-Bresson’s past to offer up the significance of this and that image. Was it the Cubist influence of his early years in Paris, or his flirtation with surrealism? Or was it the leftism of his days at Cambridge (where he acquired his fluent English) that gave him an empathy with the struggles of  independence.

Cartier-Bresson laughs ironically and sets the record straight. “(The Decisive Moment) is just a title take from a quotation in the book. It wasn’t meant to mean anything. I had to write something so I wrote this quotation from (17^th Century French churchman) Cardinal de Retz’s memoirs because I’ve always liked it. I didn’t know the publisher would use it. He was just trying to sell the book and must have thought it was a catchy title.”

Yet even today, 40 years on, debate rages about The Decisive Moment. Says Francis Hodgson of the London Photographer’s Gallery, “there is no question Cartier-Bresson is a great photographer but too much is made of his so-called uncanny sixth sense in being able to define the “truth” of a moment. He used to employ young photographers and assistants to run around for him and basically set up the shot. He would counsel them in what to look for in the image and then he’d walk in an click the shutter. Much of the important work was already done for him.”

Cartier-Bresson won’t be drawn on criticism. “This argument? I do not want this, I’m not interested. Its not my problem.”

Then suddenly, as if to counter his dismissive remarks, he gestures towards a man standing nearby in the café. “That man is interesting; look at him, fascinating.” The man is the clichéd Frenchman, unshaven with beret, Gauloise dangling  from his lips, gesticulating wildly at the waiter and silhouetted against the café door. In black and white, it could have been a Cartier-Bresson print on a yuppy’s wall.

“The trouble with photography is that it is considered art. Bullshit! We are not artists, we are artisans,” he scoffs. “What is an artist? Everyone is potentially an artist.”

CARTIER-BRESSON has not worked as a professional photographer for 21 years.

Since 1973 his keen eyes and able hands have been employed drawing, with sketchbook scenes such as those from the Jardin Tuileries, across from his Rue de Rivoli studio-apartment not far from The Louvre. He says he hasn’t “retired” from photography because he maintains  he has never worked as a photographer.

“What does it mean ‘to work’? Photography is a way of living. It is not work in the conventional sense. I’m not really that interested in photography. I’m interested in life, in what I see. Photography is instant drawing. What is best in photography is that you are catching an instant that will disappear. The photographer is like the voleur, the thief; he steals a moment, a fleeting moment and then he runs away with it in his camera. Being a photographer you have to be quick, quick, quick; you have to be like quicksilver, yes, like a tightrope dancer with death at the end.”

DEATH. Unlike his eternal images, Cartier-Bresson knows his own cannot be far off. The suffering seen during the Gulf War disturbed him. “We have come so far in this world and yet there is still so much suffering. That war was abominable. It was a putrid display of what state we are in. This technology, this technology that is standardising all of us, it was so badly applied. Everybody is guilty of this suffering. “Suffering, it is very bad, but death, it is not”

 “Do you think of death?” I ask. After a long thoughtful pause, perhaps even a minute, he replies, typically elusive.

 “Can I keep some secrets?”