The Techniques of Henri Cartier-Bresson

The Emerging Artist

Cartier-Bresson learned photography while studying painting. A self-described anarchist, he railed against the rules of his teacher and looked to photography as what he would later call "instant drawing." In 1931, his conversion to photography was established when he saw a photograph by Hungarian photographer Martin Munkacsi, "Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika." Cartier-Bresson was taken with the way the camera captured the feeling of motion, something that was just then becoming available through photographic technology.

Cartier-Bresson's technique centered around 35mm Leica rangefinder cameras with 50mm lenses, coupled with fast black-and-white film. The cameras' shutters are quiet and unobtrusive, and he often painted chrome surfaces of his cameras black to make them inconspicuous. His manner was that of a hunter, though what he was hunting for, he could not tell. His approach was intuitive, trusting his eye to recognize in an instant the geometry of perfect composition.

In 1952, Cartier-Bresson published a collection of photographs whose English title was "The Decisive Moment." This phrase became synonymous with the artist, and succinctly summarized his technique. He did not take multiple shots of the same scene, believing that there is only one precise moment in which all elements fall into place. Composition had to, in his opinion, happen in the viewfinder, instinctively, at the moment of exposure. For him, geometry and composition were inseparable.

Simply put, Cartier-Bresson had no darkroom technique. He believed that the art of the photographer existed only at the moment of exposure, and that developing and printing were elements of craft, of which he was not interested. Cropping, he felt, was a photographic crutch. He insisted that his photographs be printed in enlargers on which the negative holder had been enlarged to include 1 mm of blank film around each frame, which would appear as a black border on the finished prints.