Henri Cartier-Bresson PHOTOGRAPHER CASE STUDY 2

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) was a French photographer considered to be the father of modern photojournalism, an early adopter of 35 mm format, and the master of candid photography. He helped develop the "street photography" style that has influenced generations of photographers that followed.



Henri Cartier-Bresson was trained as a painter, and began his career in photography in 1931 on a trip to the Ivory Coast. Henri Cartier-Bresson was one of the first photographers to shoot in the 35mm format with a Leica camera, and helped to develop the photojournalistic "street photography" style that influenced generations of photographers to come.


As a young boy, Cartier-Bresson owned a Box Brownie, using it for taking holiday snapshots; he then later experimented with a 3×4 inch view camera. Henri Cartier- Bresson was raised in a traditional French bourgeois fashion, required to address his parents using the formal vous. His father assumed that his son would take up the family business, but the youth was strong-willed and upset by this prospect.
He attended École Fénelon, a Catholic school that prepared students to attend Lycée Condorcet.


Cartier-Bresson gradually 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. Cartier - Brensson 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, where he then studied English, art and literature, he then became bilingual. In 1930, stationed at Le Bourget, near Paris, he completed his mandatory service in the French Army. When he returned to France, Cartier-Bresson applied for a job with a renowned French film director Jean Renoir. He acted in Renoir's 1936 film Partie de campagne and in the 1939 La Règle du jeu, which he played a butler and served as a second assistant. Renoir made Cartier-Bresson act so he could understand how it felt to be on the other side of the camera. Cartier-Bresson also helped Renoir make a film for the Communist party on the 200 families.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Cartier-Bresson

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