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This decision didn’t bother Henri one bit. He was already traveling around the United States, working on a book with author John Malcolm Brinnin. They did not get along, and the book was not published for another 45 years, with a different author (Gilles Mora), and including some pictures taken by Henri in later years. To me Henri’s America is, or was, the true America, a document that can only be compared to the very finest work of FSA photographers and to Robert Frank’s brilliant, but more cynical, work, The Americans.
One of Henri’s photographs got me into serious trouble. At the Farmers’ Market in Los Angeles, he had photographed a young couple sitting at a lunch counter, his arm comforting her, a faraway look in her eyes. As was customary, he did not even speak to them, much less get a release, but there was nothing embarrassing or disrespectful about the picture. To me it seemed the perfect illustration for a Ladies’ Home Journal story on the problems of marriage. All might have gone well had we not published it with an unfortunate caption: “Love at first sight is often a bad risk.” It turned out that the couple were the owners of the place, a Mr. and Mrs. John W. Gill. They sued Curtis Publishing Company, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Roald Dahl (author of the article) and Curtis Circulation Company (sued as Doe Co., a corporation) for $250,000 for damages for invasion of privacy. The suit was dismissed, but it raised fundamental questions, which have only intensified since.
Henri has often expressed concern about his own photographic behavior: “There is something appalling about photographing people. It is certainly some sort of violation, so if sensitivity is lacking, there can be something barbaric about it.” He, and most of the photographers I have worked with in a lifetime of picture editing, possess that sensitivity. Others do not. Thus, the law in France has become ever more protective of people’s privacy — in my judgment ridiculously so, infringing upon the right, in fact upon the obligation, of photojournalists to report the truth about our society.
Henri justly achieved journalistic recognition in 1948 and 1949 for his coverage of Gandhi’s death in India and the Maoist revolution in China, but it was the 1952 publication of his book The Decisive Moment that firmly established his place in the history of photography. Essentially a portfolio of 126 photos, half from the East, half from the West, it announced itself as a work of art with a cover drawn by Matisse — the only color of the book. But it was Henri’s 4,500-word philosophical preface that did the trick. He wrote it first in French, taking his text from the 17th-century Cardinal de Retz: “Il n’y a rien dans ce monde qui n’ait un moment decisif.” (“There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.”) Henri applied this to photography: “To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression." Wow, I thought when I first read it, that’s what photojournalism is all about! Tériade, the Greek-born French publisher whom Henri idolized, gave the book its French title, Images à la sauvette, which could be loosely translated as “Shooting on the run.” It was the American publisher, Dick Simon of Simon & Schuster who, inspired by the cardinal, came up with the English title The Decisive Moment. That’s the one that stuck. And it was the late Margot Shore, then Magnum’s Paris bureau chief, who painstakingly worked with Henri on the English translation of the preface.
Later that year, Bob Capa came to New York for the holidays. We soon met for lunch. “It’s time for you to join us,” he said, meaning Magnum. I had been quietly helping Magnum in New York since the start but Ladies’ Home Journal was no longer their best customer. Holiday, under editor Ted Patrick and art director Frank Zachary, had that role, having financed two more “world series” along the lines of "People Are People," on women and on children. Also, they had given carte blanche to Henri to shoot whole countries: France, Italy and Ireland.
Capa, in Paris, was the undisputed ruler of Magnum’s two offices. The other founders were off shooting: Henri in the Far East, Rodger in Africa. Chim had moved to Rome, the Vandiverts had resigned after the first year. Maria Eisner had married and moved to New York, which she ran until she had the nerve to get pregnant. This upset Capa, who didn’t want a baby competing for her time, so he asked me to help him explain to Maria why she must retire. We had a similar problem in Paris. The wonderful Irish gal we called Crocky, a veteran of Life in London, had taken Maria’s place there, but her husband demanded that she join him in Stockholm. Capa asked me to plead with her to ditch her husband and stay with us. I dutifully phoned her at her Paris landlady’s. To no avail, of course. She promptly quit and joined her Alan in Stockholm.
Capa had falsely thought it necessary to keep adding photographers to stay alive, and for a time Magnum had a revolving door. Magnum listed anyone whose work Capa thought would sell, including Susy Parker, a Dior model whom he had taught to photograph. Gisele Freund was offered membership but never paid the $400 required to be a stockholder. That didn’t stop her from waving her Magnum contract for years. In New York I had been helping Maria by introducing new photographers to her and coaching the ones already there: Eve Arnold and Erich Hartmann. The only members actually added in those first years were Ernst Haas from Vienna and Werner Bischof from Zurich, both great photographers. Capa offered me $13,000 a year to run the New York office, pointing out that it was twice what they were paying the girl then running it — Maria having agreed to quit and be a mother. I replied that I was making $15,000 at the Journal and didn’t see the point, whereupon he offered me international responsibility and said, “You’ll get to come to Paris.” After consulting Edward Steichen, who had just visited Magnum Paris, and Ed Thompson, managing editor of Life, I agreed, assuming the title of Executive Editor. We celebrated at the bar of the Plaza.
The New York office was then in a basement of a brownstone on East 64th Street. No sooner had I started work in February 1953, than Capa was forced to surrender his passport to the American embassy in Paris. Once we got that straightened out — these were McCarthy times and the charges were false — Capa cabled: “Now you can buy your ticket to Paris.” He met me at Orly on a beautiful Sunday and we went almost straight to the racetrack, where I, luckily, won, and he, unluckily, lost.
The next day he introduced me to the Paris office staff, an interesting group. The one I felt most at home with was Margot Shore, whom I had met once in San Francisco, when she was married to Life photographer Charles Steinheimer. There was Capa’s cousin Susie Marquis, who handled French magazine sales; Michèle Vignes, the secretary; the somewhat alcoholic but genial Georges Ninaud, the gérant; the incorruptible accountant Mme. Presle; Mr. Ringard, brother-in-law of Russian violinist David Oistrakh, who peddled pictures to book publishers; and finally a part-time motorcycle messenger, Roger. All were crowded, along with Magnum’s Paris archives, into what had previously been the three-room Paris apartment of Maria Eisner. It was impossible for us all to sit down simultaneously. Which was fine for the photographers, since it was best if they were out shooting pictures. That is exactly what Henri was doing when I arrived, off on a Holiday assignment with Inge Morath as his researcher, and Elie. It wasn’t until my next trip that I saw him in action. A “bundle of nerves,” as he has aptly described himself, his arrival would invariably upset the entire office.
Also away was David “Chim” Seymour, who had happily moved to Rome. He invited me to meet him Milan, at his favorite little hotel which, it turned out, had been destroyed on behalf of some subway construction shortly before we both got there. We located each other the next morning by calling Magnum Paris. It was in Milan that I finally began to know Chim, who had always been something of a mystery to me. We had met through Capa in New York, and I had seen him several times in wartime London, where he had been a soldier in Air Force Intelligence. Our most incredible encounter was an accidental meeting on Boulevard Montparnasse, on Chim’s first visit to Paris after its liberation. His first question to me was, “Is Bob alive?” There were always rumors that he had been killed because he lived so dangerously. And then, “How about Henri?” “Come with me,” I said, for Capa had invited me to a party that evening and I knew that Henri would be there too.
I’ve always thought of that party, at the home of Vogue editor Michel de Brunhoff, as the first Magnum meeting. A group photo taken there shows the 3-C Magnum founders, Capa, Cartier, Chim, and I am just visible behind Bob. I came to realize what Chim meant to Magnum, something Henri has always emphasized. He represented international culture. He was at home in English and French and Italian and of course his native Polish. He could talk piano with Toscanini and art with Bernard Berenson. He knew the Vatican and its treasures, the folklore of Calabria, the archaeology of Greece. In Magnum he was a stabilizing force, with a keen insight into business, albeit too cautious for me. Forever a bachelor who kept his love life quiet, Magnum and its children were his “family” – a concept that almost made Henri retch, but he too softened after he acquired a child of his own.
Capa decided to forgo his usual holiday trip to New York at the end of 1953. He was at loose ends creatively, torn between photography and writing, which he did well. His back was seriously bothering him and he was still evading marriage. Early in 1954, however, he received an offer from Japan he could not refuse: to bring a Magnum exhibition to Japan, and to shoot whatever picture stories he wanted, with new Japanese cameras and lenses. In April he flew off to Tokyo. All was going well until, in late April, he accepted a Life assignment to substitute for Howard Sochurek in covering what proved to be the last weeks of the French war in Indochina. I phoned him to try to talk him out of going, saying, “it’s not our war.” He went anyway, and on May 25 died instantly when he stepped on a land mine. I got the news of his death on the same day that I received news of the death of Magnum’s great Swiss photographer Werner Bischof, in a road accident in Peru. It was a terrible blow to Magnum.
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