Henri Cartier-Bresson: A Biography
By Pierre Assouline; Thames & Hudson £20.00

Looking at the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson is a magical experience. The lonely figure of Nehru tells a crowd shrouded in darkness that Gandhi is dead. Deep in a fast-moving flood of refugees, a mother is crushed against her weeping son. A solitary walker, his unannounced volte-face captured in the blink of an eye, is set in perfect symmetry against a tree-lined avenue.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, founder-member of Magnum Photos, is credited with elevating photo-journalism to the status of fine art. Last year, just before his 96th birthday, the Frenchman died, leaving us with a singular vision of the 20th century. Through him, we witness the poverty of Mexico, the Liberation of Paris, the birth of India, and the first days of Communist China.

Cartier-Bresson never went anywhere without his palm-sized Leica, despised the use of a flash (“you do not thrash the water before you start fishing”), and sneaked his shots with balletic discretion. He wouldn’t use more than a roll of film when taking a portrait, preferring to wait for the “decisive moment” to arrive. As for colour, that was best left to the painters.

Cartier-Bresson’s photographs are published in their thousands, but there is only one self-portrait – of his toe. Cartier-Bresson hated fame, hated to be at the wrong end of a lens, and hated writing about his work. As he made clear to his friend, the writer Pierre Assouline, he would never submit to a biography. “The very word appalled him,” admits Assouline, in the introduction to… his biography.

Assouline is a veteran biography writer, Cartier-Bresson being the fifth French cultural icon who has come under his magnifying glass. When the author first met Cartier-Bresson in 1994, he must have had his sights set on him. They became friends, and despite Cartier-Bresson’s protestations, Assouline forged ahead with a biography in 1999. This English translation, completed after the photographer’s death, is couched in two extra chapters, more intimate than the rest.

This very intimacy, which Assouline shared with Cartier-Bresson, is more of a hindrance than a help. His deep respect for the photographer has led Assouline to protect Cartier-Bresson from our inquiring gaze; the author is more of a stone wall than a window on the great man’s life. It’s one thing to avoid the tabloid approach, another to write a life’s story without more than passing reference to two wives and one nervous breakdown.

Cartier-Bresson’s life “was punctuated by many deep and intense relationships with women”, we’re told in the final chapter. This comes as a great surprise, leaving one with the distinct feeling that throughout, a veil has been thrown politely over Cartier-Bresson’s real life story.

The plus side of such intimacy is accuracy. Every time Assouline tells a story, or offers an opinion, the presence of Cartier-Bresson is almost palpable. These are Cartier-Bresson’s stories, and Cartier-Bresson’s opinions, paraphrased but coming through loud and clear. The ghost of an autobiography hovers silently above these pages.

“When you are trying to capture the inner silences of a human being,” Assouline writes, “you do not distract him by making a noise. The camera must, as it were, get between the subject’s shirt and his skin without his noticing, for the whole point is to capture the inner vibrations and not the expressions of the face – that unknown internal picture, the essence of the soul contained within the outer frame.”

Whether this is Assouline’s analysis, or Cartier-Bresson’s, is not stated. As with many beautifully expressed (and beautifully translated) passages in the book, the photographer seems to speak through Assouline. The writer has, like a loyal disciple, fully absorbed every sentence and every image which ever touched Cartier-Bresson, and has learned to think like him.

As a chronicle of the photographer’s influences, theories and tastes, and of his professional life, this book can’t be faulted. Assouline provides a well-turned account of Cartier-Bresson’s introduction to, and life-long obsession with, geometry. He explains the importance of Surrealism, and in particular the theory of objective chance. And he returns many times to the obscure book on Zen archery which taught Cartier-Bresson to throw off his ego and to stop aiming consciously at the target.

A key difficulty in writing about Cartier-Bresson is that “in 50 years of practising photography he had not made any progress”. It is widely agreed that the photographer’s artistic voice reached maturity almost at the outset of his career. The majority of the book is not, therefore, a journey of artistic self-discovery, but instead a series of actual journeys.

Cartier-Bresson travelled the world with his Leica, making his home variously in Africa, America, Asia and Europe. He had a knack of being in the right place at the right time, enjoying a private audience with Gandhi less than an hour before he was assassinated. We hear the touching stories of his portrait sittings with various writers and artists such as Sartre and Matisse, and are regaled with the tale of Marilyn Monroe, who “blessed” the photographer’s Leica with her bottom.

Given that the emphasis is firmly on Cartier-Bresson’s work, it is maddening that none of his photographs is reproduced in the picture section. You are expected to have a library of images in your head, or in your handbag, to which you can refer. Fortunately, this season only, we can do one better, with the UK’s largest ever Cartier-Bresson exhibition in Edinburgh. If I see you there, with your head in a book, I’ll know what you’re up to.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 07.08.05