woensdag, april 30, 2003
The veteran French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, universally recognized as one of the most influential image-makers of the last century, is honoured this week with an exhibition in Paris and the opening of a foundation to preserve his life's work.
Born in 1908 to a bourgeois family in a small town east of Paris, Cartier-Bresson took up photography in the 1930s after first studying painting. After World War II, he co-founded the Magnum photo agency, and his pictures now hang in art galleries all over the world. The show at the French National Library entitled "De qui s'agit-il?" comprises some of his most famous works dating back to 1931, but also drawings, family shots and other mementoes intended to build an impression of his long and extraordinary life.
At 94 Cartier-Bresson, who shot only black-and-white film, shunned artificial light and never cropped his pictures, is seen by critics today as one of the generation of photographers responsible for elevating what was till then a hobby or a profession into a fully-fledged art-form.
His personal contribution was to combine the notion of the "Decisive Moment" (the name he gave to a major collection of his work in 1952) with the meticulous eye for design and proportion. The "Decisive Moment", he said in an oft-quoted line, "is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organisation of forms which give that event its proper expression." With the unobtrusive and fast-shooting cameras that became available from the 1930s, he was permanently on the look-out for arresting images, blazing the trail for generations of photojournalists to come. With the Leica which became his trademark and began (in his words) "prowling the streets ... determined to trap life, to preserve life in the act of living."
In 1947 he joined Robert Capa and David Seymour, two colleagues at the newspaper Ce Soir, to found Magnum Photos, which for decades set the standard for photographic reportage around the world. Cartier-Bresson was there at the start of Communism in China and the murder of Mahatma Gandhi in India. He left Magnum in 1966 to concentrate on portraiture, landscapes and drawing.
Bron: AFP.
Born in 1908 to a bourgeois family in a small town east of Paris, Cartier-Bresson took up photography in the 1930s after first studying painting. After World War II, he co-founded the Magnum photo agency, and his pictures now hang in art galleries all over the world. The show at the French National Library entitled "De qui s'agit-il?" comprises some of his most famous works dating back to 1931, but also drawings, family shots and other mementoes intended to build an impression of his long and extraordinary life.
At 94 Cartier-Bresson, who shot only black-and-white film, shunned artificial light and never cropped his pictures, is seen by critics today as one of the generation of photographers responsible for elevating what was till then a hobby or a profession into a fully-fledged art-form.
His personal contribution was to combine the notion of the "Decisive Moment" (the name he gave to a major collection of his work in 1952) with the meticulous eye for design and proportion. The "Decisive Moment", he said in an oft-quoted line, "is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organisation of forms which give that event its proper expression." With the unobtrusive and fast-shooting cameras that became available from the 1930s, he was permanently on the look-out for arresting images, blazing the trail for generations of photojournalists to come. With the Leica which became his trademark and began (in his words) "prowling the streets ... determined to trap life, to preserve life in the act of living."
In 1947 he joined Robert Capa and David Seymour, two colleagues at the newspaper Ce Soir, to found Magnum Photos, which for decades set the standard for photographic reportage around the world. Cartier-Bresson was there at the start of Communism in China and the murder of Mahatma Gandhi in India. He left Magnum in 1966 to concentrate on portraiture, landscapes and drawing.
Bron: AFP.
# posted by Jan-Edward : 10:56
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