'Genius' French photographer Cartier-Bresson dead at 95
2 hours, 59 minutes ago
PARIS (AFP) - The veteran French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, universally hailed as one of the most influential image-makers of the 20th century, has died at the age of 95, family friends said.
The notoriously reclusive co-founder of the Magnum photo agency died Tuesday in the Provence region in southern France. Liberation newspaper reported on its website that he was buried Wednesday at a private ceremony in Monjustin.
"He hadn't been eating for several days. He was getting weaker and weaker," a friend who requested anonymity told AFP.
"France has lost a genius photographer, a real master, one of the most talented artists of his generation and one of the most respected in the world," French President Jacques Chirac said in a statement.
Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres called Cartier-Bresson "a great artist and a great reporter, a humanist and a witness to the 20th century who travelled around the world with inexhaustible passion."
Born August 22, 1908 to a bourgeois family east of Paris, Cartier-Bresson took up the camera in the 1930s after first studying painting, and went on to become one of the pioneers of the new art form of photography.
Cartier-Bresson was credited with the idea of the "decisive moment" in photography, which he described as "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."
In 1947 he joined Robert Capa and David Seymour to found Magnum Photos, which for decades set the standard for photographic reportage around the world.
Armed with his trademark Leica, Cartier-Bresson documented the birth of Communism in China, the murder of Mahatma Gandhi in India and the Spanish Civil War.
Though many of his images are imbued with spirituality and reverence, he himself rejected organized religion.
"God is a world of guilt. With original sin we are guilty for being alive, it's monstrous. In any case I have never believed," he said in an AFP interview in April of last year.
Among the famous names who sat for him were Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Matisse, Edith Piaf and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. He quit professional photography and Magnum in 1966 to concentrate on portraiture, landscapes and drawing.
Organizers of a Cartier-Bresson retrospective currently playing in Berlin said Wednesday they were considering extending the show, which was to run through August 15.
Last year in Paris, the National Library hosted a major retrospective of Cartier-Bresson's work, with tens of thousands of photography fans lining up to see some 350 images spanning four decades.
At the same time, the shy and soft-spoken photographer founded the Henri Cartier-Bresson foundation, dedicated to preserving his images for future generations and helping researchers and professionals in their work.
In the interview as the exhibit opened in April, Cartier-Bresson reflected on death, and how Asian or Latin cultures treat the issue in contrast to many in the West.
"We French don't think about it (death). We don't want to think about it," he said.
"But in India people think about it all the time. In Mexico, too. What I like about that country is that death is very much alive."
Srinagar, Kashmir, 1948
Hyères, 1932
Seville, 1933
Roman Amphitheatre, Valencia, 1933
This one cracks me up:
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Alberto Giacometti, 1961
Linear Mode
