Tag:candid photography
Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French photographer considered the founding father of photojournalism. He was also one of the first true street photographers using 35 mm film and pioneering the genre of street photography. He viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment. The “decisive moment” refers to capturing a fleeting and spontaneous event, where the image represents the essence of the event itself.
“I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant.“
~Henri Cartier Bresson~
The Early Years
Cartier-Bresson was born on August 22, 1908, at Chanteloup, near Paris. His father was a respected and wealthy textile merchant, and he was given a strict Roman Catholic education. Cartier-Bresson’s uncle was an accomplished painter, and under his influence, he studied in Paris with Cubist painter and sculptor Andre Lhote from 1927-28. In 1929 Cartier-Bresson studied literature and painting at the University of Cambridge. While, as a young boy, he had used a Box Brownie, it wasn’t until 1930, after seeing the work of Eugene Atget and Man Ray, that he took a serious interest in photography.
In 1931, during a year on the Ivory Coast, he began recording his experiences. While on the Ivory Coast, he contracted blackwater fever (a form of malaria). Fearing he was dying, he sent a letter home instructing his grandfather to bury him in Normandy while Debussy’s String Quartet was played. His uncle replied his grandfather “finds it expensive and prefers that you return home first”. Fortunately, Cartier-Bresson recovered.
The Unseen Photographer
In 1932 Cartier-Bresson purchased his first 35mm Leica. The small size appealed to him, as he wished to remain silent and unseen when taking photographs. To become even more anonymous in the scene, he covered the bright silver parts of the camera with black tape to make it even less visible. On occasion, he even hid the camera under a handkerchief. Throughout his life, Cartier-Bresson mainly stuck to three fixed lenses – 35mm, 50mm and 135mm.
Between 1932 and 1935, he travelled throughout Eastern Europe, Spain and Mexico. In 1932 Cartier-Bresson took two of his most famous images – The cyclist caught gliding down a cobbled hill at the base of some stone steps in Hyères and The man jumping over a puddle behind the Gare Saint-Lazare.
His first photojournalism images were published in 1937 when, under assignment from the French weekly Regards, he covered the coronation of King George IV and Queen Elizabeth. However, Cartier-Bresson photographed the crowds and people, not taking a single image of the King and Queen. Also, that year, he married a Javanese dancer named Ratna Mohini. They divorced 30 years later.
The War years
Cartier-Bresson joined the French Army’s photographic unit at the outbreak of WWII as a corporal. His work, at this time, involved filming and photographing artillery fire, road bombardments and troop movements. However, in 1940, he was taken prisoner by the Germans. After three attempts, he escaped in 1943 and returned to France with forged papers.
Before being captured, he had buried his beloved Leica on a farm in France near the Vosges mountains. So one of the first things he did after escaping was to return to the farm, dig up his camera, and return to Paris to join the resistance. Finally, after four years of occupation, on August 19, 1944, French Resistance forces and Allied troops began their liberation of Paris. Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and George Rodger (who would come to be three of the four founders of Magnum Photos) were all there recording the retreat. They documented the historic scenes as the city transformed from a place of oppression to one of freedom.
Founding Magnum
In 1945, Cartier-Bresson and the U.S. photographer Robert Capa, David Seymour and Ernst Haas founded the photographers’ cooperative Magnum Photos. The photographers owned the rights to their images, a novel concept at the time. Under the umbrella of Magnum, Cartier-Bresson concentrated more than ever on photojournalism. He travelled through India, China, Indonesia, and Egypt.
“Photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organisation of forms which give that event its proper expression.”
~Henri Cartier-Bresson~
Like Margaret Bourke-White, he was in India to photograph India’s independence from Britain. While there, he photographed Mahatma Gandhi barely 15 minutes before Gandhi was assassinated. The material from those years, plus Europe in the 1950s, became the subjects of several books published between 1952 and 1956. These publications cemented Cartier-Bresson’s reputation as a master of his craft.
Fame and Glory
In 1955, France honoured him when a retrospective exhibition of 400 of his photographs was held at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris. The show then travelled through Europe, the United States, and Japan. At the end of the exhibition, the photographs were consigned to the Bibliothèque Nationale (National Library) in Paris for posterity. He was also awarded the Overseas Press Club Award and Prix de la Societe Francaise de Photographie.
In 1963 he travelled to and photographed in Cuba, followed by Mexico in 1964 and India in 1965. Then, during the student revolt in Paris in May 1968, he was there with his 35-mm camera. In 1966, after being a photographer for 30 years, he left Magnum and gave up the camera. For the rest of his life, he concentrated on landscapes and portraiture, but with a pen and paintbrush. In 1967 he married Magnum photographer Martine Franck, and the couple had one daughter, Melanie.
“I have always been passionate about painting,” writes Cartier-Bresson. “As a child, I painted on Thursdays and Sundays, and dreamed about it every other day.”
~Henri Cartier-Bresson~
FRANCE. Paris. 1992.
Cartier-Bresson died in Montjustin (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France) on August 3, 2004, aged 95. No cause of death was announced. His wife, Martine Cartier-Besson, passed away in 2012 from Leukemia.
Vivian Dorothy Maier was an American amateur street photographer, often described as Mary Poppins with a camera. Born on February 1, 1926, in New York City to French/Austrian parents, she bounced between the U.S. and France during her childhood. In 1949, while living in France, Maier began experimenting with photography. Her first camera was a Kodak Box Brownie.
She was an intensely private person changing her name as she moved from family to family, calling herself Meyer, Mayer, Meier, Maier, or even Viv Smith.
Chicago
Maier returned to New York in 1951 on the Steamship De-grass’ and worked in Southampton as a nanny. In 1952 she purchased a German-made Rolleiflex camera. In 1956 Maier moved to Highland Park, a northern suburb of Chicago, to accept a job as a nanny for the Gensberg family. While with the Gensbergs, she would venture out to the streets of Chicago with her medium format Rolleiflex to photograph the neighbourhoods.
Years later, the three Gensberg boys she cared for recalled being taken to rough areas so their beloved nanny could pursue photography. At the Gensberg family home, she also had use of a darkroom.
Urban Human Landscape
Maier photographed the urban human landscape over three decades. Her preferred subjects were children, the poor, the marginalised, and the elderly, some of them aware of her and some not. She also made several self-portraits.
Between 1959 and 1960, Maier embarked on a solo trip around the world, taking pictures in Los Angeles, Manila, Bangkok, Shanghai, Beijing, India, Syria, Egypt, and Italy.
The Later Years
In the 1970s, with the children grown, Maier left the family and lost access to her darkroom. For a brief time in the 1970s, Maier worked as a housekeeper for talk-show host Phil Donahue. As she moved from family to family, her collection of rolls of undeveloped, unprinted work began to grow again. Maier had worked in a black-and-white documentary style until this time. However, she now switched to colour and adopted a more abstract approach. For her colour work, Maier stopped using the Rolleiflex and instead shot with her Leica and various German SLR cameras.
The colour work had an edge that hadn’t been seen in her work, becoming more abstract as time passed. Found objects, newspapers, and graffiti slowly replaced the people in her images. Her work also began to show a compulsion to save items she would find in garbage cans or lying beside the curb.
Hard Times
Now in her 70s, in the late 1990s, her financial situation worsened, and Maier put down her camera. Her belongings were placed in storage while she struggled to stay afloat. Finally, she became destitute and was about to be evicted from an apartment in Cicero. The Gensburg brothers banded together and arranged a small studio apartment for her in a better area.
In 2008, aged 82, she fell on a patch of ice in downtown Chicago, hitting her head. While she was expected to make a full recovery, her health began to deteriorate, forcing her into a nursing home. She passed away the following year in Illinois on April 20, 2009, aged 83. Maier had taken over 150,000 photographs in her lifetime.
The Maloof Collection
With Maier’s meagre means and the Gensberg brothers unaware of their existence, the storage locker containing her images was sold off due to non-payment of rent. The storage company auctioned off the negatives to RPN Sales. They, in turn, auctioned the boxes in a much larger auction to several buyers.
One of the buyers was John Maloof, a twenty-five-year-old real estate agent. Maloof purchased 30,000 negatives, sight unseen, for $400. Maloof was looking for vintage images of Chicago for a book he was publishing. Realising the photos were not what he wanted, he closed the box and put it on a shelf. Two years later, he took another look and, going through the box, found an envelope with her name. Maloof googled the name and found her death notice published just a few days before. Since then, Maloof has continued to acquire her negatives and now owns around 100,000 of them. Estimates are that Maloof now owns about 90% of her work, with Jeffrey Goldstein owning the remainder.
The School of Art Institute in Chicago established the Vivian Maier Scholarship Fund to provide female students with additional financial resources. John Maloof endowed the scholarship from funds received from print sales and his film, directed by Charlie Siskel, Finding Vivian Maier. Howard Greenberg and Charlie Siskel also provided donations.
Epilogue
However, Maier’s story doesn’t entirely end there. With the newfound fame around her images plus the publicity and income they generated, lawyers and potential heirs started putting their hands up. John Maloof had tracked down an heir and paid them for copyright. However, another lawyer claimed to have found another cousin in France and asked the court to nominate that cousin instead as heir to Maier’s Estate. In 2019, Maier’s images printed posthumously from her original negatives went up for sale in London for between $5k to $6.5k each.
© Estate of Vivian Maier; Courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery
The Cook County public administrator in Chicago then took over what it considered an “unsettled estate”. A settlement was reached, allowing Maloof to continue to produce and exhibit the collection, keeping an undisclosed portion of the profits with the balance going to the Estate. So far, the exhibition has travelled through Europe and is currently in the U.K. until September 25.
Maloof was given the Estate’s blessing to make two significant donations to the University of Chicago to preserve Maiers’s legacy. The first donation was 500 prints in 2017, followed by another donation of 2,700 photographs in 2019. The prints will be held and made accessible to researchers allowing them to explore Maier’s printing process
Further Reading: Vivian Undeveloped: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny by Ann Mark
Note
The copyrights in the photography contained in this post are owned by the Estate of Vivian Maier. The Estate grants a limited license to media and press to reproduce the attached images in articles concerning Vivian Maier and/or John Maloof’s donation of vintage prints of Vivian Maier’s work to the University of Chicago. Hi-resolution versions of images may be used in connection with print versions of articles only. For electronic and online publications, the reproduced images may not exceed 1500 pixels on the longest side and 72 dpi. Unauthorised reproduction, distribution, or exhibition could result in liability under the Copyright Act. Publication of any of these images requires accompanying use of this notice: “Unpublished work © 2017 The Estate of Vivian Maier. All rights reserved.”