Editor's note: John G. Morris wrote a remembrance of his friend and coworker Henri Cartier-Bresson for the September 2004 issue of News Photographer magazine after Cartier-Bresson’s death. The piece, edited down to a shorter version for publication in the magazine, is presented here in its full length.
By John G. Morris
News Photographer magazine
It was just before lunch, in the rambling stone farmhouse on a hill near the village of Céreste, in the region of Provence called the Luberon. The phone rang. Martine Franck answered it and passed it on: “For you, Henri, it’s Magnum Paris. Brassaï has died. They want you to say something.”
It was not difficult for Henri Cartier-Bresson, then 76, to pay immediate tribute to Brassaï, born Gyula Halász in Transylvanian Hungary. He was 85. Both were prominent members of the French artistic community, photographers who were also graphic artists — Brassaï was also a poet and sculptor. Both were friends of Picasso, especially Brassaï. Both had been honored by the American Society of Magazine Photographers.
It was July 11, 1984, my second year of living in France with my wife, photographer Tana Hoban — whose lifetime work was also honored by the ASMP. We had just come from the annual photo festival in Arles. I had once spoken there to honor W. Eugene Smith, because I was his friend, and he had chosen me to carry on for him after his death. Henri had spoken of Brassaï as a friend. Suddenly it occurred to me to ask, “Henri, do you think of me as a friend?” He thought a moment and then replied, “I think of you as a colleague.” I was crushed at the time, for it was Henri who had first introduced me to Brassaï, back in August, 1944, a few days after the liberation of Paris from German occupation. That was a day I shall never forget, for it was the day I first met Henri.
As London picture editor for Life magazine, I had come to Paris as soon as I possibly could after editing the story of the Liberation, which was covered by six Life photographers. I managed to get orders to fly to a landing strip somewhere in Normandy and hitchhiked to Paris in jeeps and command cars, finally checking into the Hotel Scribe at 3am. The Scribe was then Allied press headquarters. Life’s temporary office was a room over the front door. Soon we moved into grander quarters on the Place de la Concorde.
It was my first time in Paris. My French was strictly high school, and I wanted to put together a picture story of life under the Occupation and the Liberation. Robert Capa, the one Life photographer to whom Paris was home, took pity on me. “I have a friend who will show you around. He’s a photographer who knows everybody, and was in the underground. He even speaks English. His name is Henri Cartier-Bresson.” The name meant nothing to me at the time, although he was already well known among the avant-garde.
The next morning a polite young man met me at the door of the Scribe, across from the Grand Hotel. He looked straight out of the Ivy League. He had come on his bicycle, one pant leg clipped. Since I had no transport we set off on foot. First stop the Paris office of The New York Times, which also housed the photo agency Wide World, then owned by the Times. The door was open and nobody was there — it was many hours before New York deadlines. Henri seemed at home there, but couldn’t find whatever he was looking for.
So on we went, making calls that day on Brassaï and Robert Doisneau and René Zuber, and other photographers who had worked clandestinely during the occupation. I accepted whatever prints were offered, with promises to pay upon publication. The best pictures showed the building of barricades during the Paris insurrection. From Doisneau I got a good close-up of a lad of ten ripping up paving stones, from Zuber one of a man sitting on sandbags, prepared to hold off the German army with a pistol. Nothing that day from Brassaï. Henri, whether from modesty, but more likely because he didn’t have prints, never mentioned his own photos of the Liberation, now recognized as among the best.
Finally it came time for lunch and Henri walked me to the family apartment on the Rue de Lisbonne in the bourgeois 8th arrondissement. I found it rather dreary. His parents were in the country, but we were served by an elderly maid. The lunch consisted of vegetables, with coarse brown bread and red wine. Henri apologized: “We don’t buy on the black market.”
* * * * * *
Now Henri is gone, at 95, and it’s big news — front-page headlines in Le Monde, The Washington Post, The New York Times; his camera-shy face filling almost the entire front page of The Guardian on the stands in London, his photos spread through an entire issue of the Paris tabloid Libération, and thirty-three pages in Paris Match.
It’s not the first time that Henri has “disappeared,” as the French say. As a young man in Africa he got so sick that he sent instructions for his own funeral — to take place in Normandy, with a string quartet playing Debussy. The family reply: “Your grandfather finds that too expensive. It would be preferable that you return first.” Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, curators of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, thought he had died in World War II, and planned a “posthumous” exhibition at MOMA in 1946. And in 1954 he was the subject of a published remembrance by Bob Considine of the Hearst press, who had confused him with Robert Capa.
Henri calmly faced the inevitable. One day after lunch at the farmhouse, he asked me, “Would you come up the hill for my funeral?” The actual one was held in a nearby village, with only family and a handful of friends present. He has already achieved prominence for posterity with the establishment last year of the HCB Foundation, in a handsome building in Montparnasse (News Photographer, June 2003).
Who was this remarkable man? The oldest of five children — his siblings all died before he did, Henri was born on August 22, 1908 in Chanteloup, country home of the Cartier-Bresson family, then famous as manufacturers of thread. He was raised in traditional French bourgeois fashion, required to address his parents as vous, rather than the familiar tu. His father assumed that Henri would take up the family business, but he rebelled against this from the start. He determinedly failed his baccalaureate and began to study painting.
His teacher was André Lhote, a minor star in the French artistic firmament, but a gifted teacher, and one who sought to bridge the gap between modern art and French classicism. Henri regarded Lhote as his one teacher of photography — without a camera. Later, he left Lhote’s studio, saying, “I didn’t want to get involved in his sort of doctrinaire spirit,” and continued on, spurred by the desire to make “a complete break.” He spent a year at Cambridge studying English art and literature, becoming bilingual. Then, following the required year of military service, he sought adventure in Africa, stalking game — learning methods he would later use in shooting pictures. He took along a Kodak Brownie, but his films did not survive the tropics. It was there on the Ivory Coast that he contracted blackwater fever and almost died.
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