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Capa was gone, Chim was gone – killed by an Egyptian machine gunner when riding with a reckless Paris Match photographer, trying to cover a prisoner exchange a day after the cease fire at Suez in 1956. George Rodger, home-building in Kent, had retreated from Magnum business. And now I was gone. Cornell Capa helped me devise ways to keep going, editing a “Magnum News Service.” He would also keep his brother’s archives going, eventually founding the International Center of Photography to house and exhibit them, along with the work of countless others.
Henri, who had always been intellectually indispensable to Magnum, was now even more so. On May 25, 1962, which happened to be the anniversary of Bob’s death, he wrote “some thoughts” to all (Magnum) photographers:
I wish to remind everyone that Magnum was created to allow us, and in fact to oblige us, to bring testimony on our world and contemporaries according to our own abilities and interpretations… but I feel a hard touch of sclerosis descending upon us. When events of significance are taking place, when it doesn’t involve a great deal of money and when one is nearby one must stay photographically in contact with the realities taking place in front of our lenses and not hesitate to sacrifice material comfort and security. This return to our sources would keep our heads and lenses above the artificial life which so often surrounds us. I am shocked to see to what extent so many of us are conditioned almost exclusively by the desires of the clients. I know everybody has his problems and is doing what he can. I am writing this without hard feelings, but: Vive la révolution permanente et le respect de la vie.
Four years later he retired as an active Magnum member but left behind his archives, and his conscience. In 1967 Henri and Elie divorced. We all knew that it had been an intense marriage. I recall once riding in the back seat of a Paris taxi, sitting between them while they fought across me. But there were also many tender moments. In London one evening we drove together to the home of the great photographer Bill Brandt, expecting dinner. Instead we found a note: “Had to go to Wales. Sorry.” When Elie died in 1990 Henri privately published a little volume of her poetry, in French and English, entitled Nos ombres en fête – “Our Festive Shadows.” In 1970, Henri married a much younger photographer, Martine Franck, who is now a Magnum member. She has the elegance of a swan and the patience of a saint. Both have worked (separately) on assignment for The New York Times and visited me there when I was picture editor (News Photographer, June, 2003).
In January 1973, I received a letter from Henri: “Back we are (from Moscow) — but three now, instead of two! On our arrival we learned that the adoption we asked for had been granted, so we have a little girl seven and a half months old, named Mélanie, beautiful, gay, vivacious... Shame to say that I started using only now the Polaroid that Dr. Land gave me seven years ago, on the occasion of our shared prize from the German Photographic Association!”
Along about 1960, desperate to make money somehow, we at Magnum offered to sell prints by Henri and other photographers – we even included our friends Ansel Adams and Edward Weston – for $35 to $50 apiece. No takers. It was not until 1970 when Ansel, thanks to his clever business manager William Turnage and to photography dealer Harry Lunn, developed a market for Ansel’s gorgeous personally-made prints, such as Moonrise (over New Mexico), that the sale of prints to collectors took off. Even so, there was little market then for the prints that Magnum photographers did not make themselves, those made by Picto in Paris and other labs in New York, even though they were often of exceptional quality.
In 1978 I became executor for the estate of W. Eugene Smith, who died at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Gene’s prints, on which he had sometimes worked for days, were only beginning to sell for thousands instead of hundreds of dollars. I was determined to do better for him, and eventually did. On Friday, May 4, 1979, on one of my many visits to the University’s Center for Creative Photography, which housed Smith’s archives, the Center’s director Jim Enyeart handed me a catalogue for a special sale of “Vintage Photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson” to be held the following Monday at the Phillips auction house on Madison Avenue. I couldn’t imagine what it was all about. I called Helen Wright, a friend of Henri’s who had been handling his burgeoning print sales in New York. She told me that Henri was trying to stop the sale and had delivered a letter of protest to the Paris office of The New York Times, stating that “certain photographs are not “authenticated” by my signature.” I returned to New York and on Sunday went to Phillips to inspect the prints. I immediately recognized most of them as “distribution” prints, which Magnum normally sent out to magazines and agents throughout the world. They were authentic enough prints, just unsigned. I had lunch on Monday with Gene Smith’s lawyer Arthur Soybel. We agreed that Henri was wrong. The prints, even if stolen, were certainly authentic. We called Magnum’s lawyer and got him to call off Henri’s demand to stop the sale. Two weeks later my wife Midge and I were in Paris, and invited by Martine and Henri for a drink. Henri went to a back room and returned with a print in his hand and a grin on his face. He ceremoniously tore the print into small bits, dumped them into a brown envelope, stamped the envelope with his credit and wrote on it, “not ‘authenticated’ (meaning “signed” in French) by Henri Cartier-Bresson.” He then turned to me and said, “That’s one time my English betrayed me.” The envelope with those pieces now rests in the Special Collection of my papers at the University of Chicago Library.
* * * * *
This piece could go on indefinitely, with what to me are delightful and sometimes sad recollections. How Henri scolded me for suggesting that he lunch with photographer Annie Liebowitz, only to discover her taping him from her handbag; how he failed to reply when I scolded him for suppressing the French edition of David Douglas Duncan’s unfortunate book of Henri’s Faces; how he inspired so many young photographers, including Oliver Morris; how he once pulled his little pocketknife on me in anger; how, when invited to dinner at our first Paris apartment, the concierge wouldn’t let him in because he didn’t know the code, even though he had hidden in that building in his days in the Paris Underground; how I got him to caption his pictures in a Quest portfolio by simply asking him to write “postcards;” how I told him that he was in danger of going down in history as an artist instead of as a photographer and he replied that he was “just a jack-of-all-trades”; how thoughtful he was when he learned of the terminal illness of my first wife; and how he appreciated my second wife Midge, who once edited News Photographer magazine, and later died of cancer; how he once told me to shut up during a film screening; and how he asked me to sit for a portrait – which cannot be found.
Soon after his death, Martine sent me this eMail: “Dear John: Thank you for your message. Henri left us peacefully and now I have to learn to live without him.”
So shall we all.
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