Henri Cartier-Bresson (August 22, 1908 – August 3, 2004) was a French photographer. Cartier-Bresson is considered to be the father of modern photojournalism. He was one of the first serious photographers to shoot in the smaller 35mm format, and is commonly considered the master of candid photography using the 35mm rangefinder camera. He helped to develop the "street photography" style that influenced generations of photographers that followed.

Childhood

Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup-en-Brie, near Paris, France, the eldest of five children. His father was a wealthy textile manufacturer who liked to sketch in his spare time. At one time, almost every French sewing kit was stocked with "Cartier-Bresson" thread. On his mother's side were cotton merchants and landowners from Normandy, where he spent part of his childhood. The Cartier-Bresson family lived in a grand bourgeois neighborhood of Paris, near the Europe Bridge, and provided him with the financial support to develop his interests in photography in a more independent manner than many of his contemporaries.

As a young boy, Cartier-Bresson owned a Box Brownie, using it for taking holiday snapshots; he later experimented with a 3×4 inch view camera. He was raised in a traditional French bourgeois fashion, required to address his parents as vous rather than the familiar tu. His father assumed that his son would take up the family business, but Henri was headstrong and was "strongly appalled"[citation needed] by the prospect.

The early years

Cartier-Bresson was educated in Paris. He attended the École Fénelon, a Catholic school. He was introduced to the feel of oil painting by his Uncle Louis, a gifted painter. "Painting has been my obsession from the time that my 'mythical father', my father's brother, led me into his studio during the Christmas holidays in 1913, when I was five years old. There I lived in the atmosphere of painting; I inhaled the canvases."[citation needed] Uncle Louis taught him painting for a short while before he was killed during World War I.

In 1927, at the age of 19, he entered a private art school and the Paris studio of the Cubist and sculptor André Lhote, the Lhote Academy (in the Rue d'Odessa in the Montparnasse district). Lhote's ambition was to unify the Cubists' approach to reality with classical artistic forms, and to link the French classical tradition of Poussin and David to Modernism. Cartier-Bresson also studied painting with society portraitist Jacques Émile Blanche. While painting, he read Dostoevsky, Schopenhauer, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Freud, Proust, Joyce, Hegel, Engels and Marx. Lhote took his pupils to the Louvre to study classical artists and to Parisian galleries to study contemporary art. Cartier Bresson's interest in modern art was combined with an admiration for the works of the Renaissance—of masterpieces from Jan van Eyck, Paolo Uccello, Masaccio and Piero della Francesca. Cartier-Bresson often regarded Lhote as his teacher of photography without a camera.

Although Cartier-Bresson gradually began to feel uncomfortable with Lhote's "rule-laden" approach to art, his rigorous theoretical training would later help him to confront and resolve problems of artistic form and composition in photography. At the time, schools of photographic realism were founded throughout Europe. Each had a differing concept on how photography should develop. The photography revolution had begun, "Crush tradition! Photograph things as they are!"[citation needed] The Surrealist movement founded in 1924 was a big driver of this change in approach. While still studying at Lhote's studio, Cartier-Bresson began socializing with the Surrealists at the Café Cyrano, in the Place Blanche. He met a number of the movement's leading protagonists, and was particularly drawn to the Surrealist movement of linking the subconscious and the immediate to their work. Peter Galassi explains:

The Surrealists approached photography in the same way that Aragon and Breton...approached the street: with a voracious appetite for the usual and unusual...The Surrealists recognized in plain photographic fact an essential quality that had been excluded from prior theories of photographic realism. They saw that ordinary photographs, especially when uprooted from their practical functions, contain a wealth of unintended, unpredictable meanings.[1]

Cartier-Bresson matured artistically in this stormy cultural and political environment. He was aware of the concepts and theories mentioned but could not find a way of expressing this imaginatively in his paintings. He was very frustrated with his experiments and subsequently destroyed the majority of his early works.

From 1928 to 1929, Cartier-Bresson attended the University of Cambridge studying English art and literature and became bilingual. In 1930, he did his mandatory service in the French Army. He was stationed at Le Bourget, near Paris. He remembered, "And I had quite a hard time of it, too, because I was toting Joyce under my arm and a Lebel rifle on my shoulder."[citation needed]