Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1908-2004

By James Nachtwey

He made us see. Cartier-Bresson, HCB, Hank Carter or just Henri--always said with pride and affection--was the master in whose shadow documentary photography will always exist. Before his death last week at the age of 95, he spent his life reconciling opposites, not laboriously but in an instant, with the grace of an athlete, on the run. Through his eyes we see the universal in the specific, large issues in small things, mystery in the obvious, poetry in the mundane. We see infinity in the blink of an eye.

When I decided to become a photographer, he became my virtual teacher. I didn't have enough money to buy books, so I would go to bookstores every day, stand in the aisles and study the works of great photographers. I quickly learned that Cartier-Bresson was the foundation of contemporary photography. I looked at his pictures every day, sometimes for hours at a time. They never got old. There was always something I hadn't seen before, a hidden meaning right there on the surface, a new formal insight, a sudden smile, a subtle barb aimed at hypocrisy.

He made an image in Spain of a band of children playing on a street, a heavyset man in a suit and fedora walking through their midst and, in the background, a constellation of windows scattered across the wall of a building. It wasn't a picture about anything. It was a moment most of us would never notice, but in his eyes it became an enigma, so full of suspense, you could almost hear the click of a detonator.

He was born and bred in France, but he was mercurial, synchronized to the changing tides of history. He was in China on the eve of revolution and with Mahatma Gandhi 15 minutes before his death. But Cartier-Bresson was not a reporter. The world in process was his raw material. He was difficult to define, and he could not be contained, as the Germans found out when he escaped from a prison camp during World War II and joined the Resistance.

Later, when I began to earn enough to buy books, his were the first and the most cherished. Before going to sleep at night, I'd open one of his books, and it was like reading a novel by Faulkner. He saw so incisively that by adhering to facts, he revealed the source of fiction. It was life itself, and he questioned and celebrated it in the same heartbeat.