Cartier-Bresson, Henri

From Philosopedia

Cartier-Bresson, Henri (22 Aug 1908 - ) A French photojournalist, Cartier-Bresson became renowned for his countless memorable images of 20th century individuals and events. In 1944, after escaping from a German prison camp, he organized underground photography units. Cartier-Bresson was a founder of the Magnum photo agency, and he wrote The Decisive Moment (1952), People of Moscow (1955), China in Transition (1956), The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson (1968), The Face of Asia (1972), and About Russia (1974). In an interview with Michel Nuridsany (The New York Review of Books, 2 March 1995), Cartier-Bresson spoke of having gone to Ecole Fénelon, a Catholic school that prepared one for the Lycée Condorcet. One day, he related,

. . . the proctor there caught me reading a volume of Rimbaud or Mallarmé, right at the start of the school year, in the lower sixth. He said to me: “Let’s have no disorder in your studies!” He used the informal tu–which usually meant you were about to get a good thrashing. But he went on: “You’re going to read in my office.” Well, that wasn’t an offer he had to repeat: I did read there, for a year. It’s why I never managed to graduate. But I read everything you could possibly read: Proust, the Russian novelists, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Nietzsche, or course. And a book on Schopenhauer that led me to Romain Rolland and to Hinduism. That had a huge effect on me. I had never been a Christian believer. My mother once said: “Poor dear, if only you had a good Dominican confessor, you wouldn’t be in such a fix!” But at the same time, she gave me Jean Barois [a novel by Roger Martin du Gard] to read, and the pre-Socratics. She was a left-wing Catholic. Myself, I’m a libertarian.

{CE}