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Returning to France, he hung around with the Surrealists. Their inspired lunacy appealed to him but he never really became a Surrealist, especially after Robert Capa later told him it was no way to make a living. His aim was “to paint and change the world,” but he felt insecure as a painter and often destroyed his work. As Peter Galassi of MOMA observed about him at this point, “art still counted far less than adventure.”
Henri was inspired by a photo taken by Hungarian photojournalist Martin Munkacsi showing three boys running into the surf of Lake Tanganyika. It perhaps made him realize what he could have done in Africa. He began to take photography seriously. In Marseilles he acquired a Leica with a 50mm lens; it would accompany him for many years. “I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, ready to ‘trap’ life.” Restless, he photographed in Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and Madrid, where he had his first photo exhibition in 1933. Not much in France; it would be years before he photographed there extensively. He spent 1934 in Mexico, where he shared an exhibition with Manuel Alvarez Bravo. He and William Henry Jackson are the only important photographers who lived longer than Henri — each died at 99. I was lucky to meet them both.
In 1935 he came to America for the first time. He loved the pace of New York, the nickel subway, the Automat with its apple pie, the life of Harlem. Julien Levy gave him an exhibition, along with Bravo and Walker Evans. He took few photos in New York. Carmel Snow of Harper’s Bazaar gave him an assignment to do fashion, with disastrous results — he had no idea what to do with the models. Nevertheless, she was the first American editor to publish his other photographs. In New York he met Paul Strand, who had switched for a time from stills to films. Returning to France, Henri applied for a job with the great director Jean Renoir. He was given a small part — as a priest — in a film, and also worked as an assistant director. He helped Renoir do a film for the Communist party, on the 200 families who ran France — including his own.
In 1934 Henri met a young Polish intellectual, a photographer named David Szymin, called Chim because his name was so difficult to pronounce. Later Szymin became Seymour. The two had much in common culturally. Chim insisted on introducing Henri to a Hungarian photographer named André Friedmann, who would soon change his name to Robert Capa.
Chim and Capa had begun to make a living by selling their photographs through Alliance Photo, the agency of a young woman named Maria Eisner, another refugee from Nazism. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Chim and Capa went off to cover it — Capa went many times and became famous for his photo of a Spanish militiaman caught in the moment of death.
Capa also taught his German girlfriend Gerda Taro to take pictures; she became a talented photographer. She died in Spain in 1937, crushed by a tank. Capa was devastated. When I visited Gerda’s grave in Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery a few weeks ago, there was a tiny bunch of dry flowers resting on it, with a mysterious note: “From Bob, with love.” Next year, New York’s International Center of Photography will finally show Gerda’s work, which has often been credited to Capa.
Henri, busy with films, did not cover the war in Spain. He was first published as a photojournalist in 1937, his assignment — the coronation of King George VI, for the French weekly Regards. He focused on the new monarch’s adoring subjects lining the London streets, and took no pictures of the king. The credit was simply Cartier — he has always been ambivalent about using his full family name.
He also married the Javanese dancer Ratna Mohini that year, and they had set up housekeeping in a fourth-floor servants’ flat at 19, Rue Danielle Casanova. There was one large studio room, a small bedroom and kitchen, a bathroom where Henri once developed his films. I have often stayed there and Henri offered it to Tana and me when we first moved to Paris.
In 1938 he got a job as a photographer with the French Communist paper Ce Soir. The three C’s — Capa, Cartier, Chim — were all leftists, but none of them joined the Communist party. With the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, Henri joined the French army as a corporal in the Film and Photo unit. Taken prisoner when the Germans conquered France in June 1940, he was forced to perform “thirty-two different kinds of hard manual labor.” He worked “as slowly and as poorly as possible.” Twice he escaped, and was punished by solitary confinement. His third escape was successful and he made his way to a “safe” farm near Tours. Obtaining false papers, he worked for the Underground, aiding other escapees and working secretly with other photographers to cover the Occupation and then, the Liberation.
In 1946 Cartier-Bresson returned to America. In New York Henri and Ratna, whom we all called Elie, stayed in a railroad apartment belonging to James Dugan, located almost under the Queensboro Bridge. Jimmy was a mutual friend with whom I had made the rounds of pubs in wartime London, where he had worked for Stars & Stripes. I visited them there. Elie introduced me to Indonesian food — somewhat akin to eating dynamite.
My pub-crawling days were now over. With three small children and a house in the suburbs, I had quit Life in 1946 to become picture editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, America’s leading women’s magazine. For years, the Journal had been running a series on American families called "How America Lives." Martin Munkacsi had been photographing most of them, on a hit and run basis. Influenced by Roy Stryker and his group of documentary photographers who had worked for the Farm Security Administration and now worked for him at Standard Oil, I was determined to bring serious photojournalism into reporting family life. Not only that, I wanted to report on families around the world. I called my project "People Are People the World Over."
In the spring of 1947, Robert Capa came to New York and told me that at last he was starting the cooperative picture agency that he and his Paris pals had long dreamed of — Magnum. They would divide up the world: George Rodger, who had quit Life in London after covering the war, would go to Africa and the Middle East, Chim, who spoke most European languages, would work there, Henri would go to India and China. Bill Vandivert, who had also left Life, would work in America, and Capa would work anywhere money was to be made. The Paris office would be run by Maria Eisner, formally of Alliance Photo. New York would be run by Rita Vandivert, Bill’s wife, who would also be Magnum’s first president.
Capa saw me as the ideal first customer for Magnum, which had just formally incorporated, following a luncheon meeting at the Museum of Modern Art. I agreed to assign Capa to do a farm family in Iowa, as a test of the "People Are People" idea, but first we had to celebrate with a magnum of champagne at the Vandiverts’ New York apartment. The Iowa test was successful, and I was given a modest budget for the worldwide project. George Rodger would do families in Egypt, Equatorial Africa and Pakistan; Chim would do France and Germany. I refused, however, to assign Henri to do India and China. Knowing him, I didn’t believe he would shoot, from a script, the list of 20 basic pictures. If we failed to photograph any one of them in any one country, the whole series idea would fall apart.
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