Artist Research ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson ~ Light and Shadow.

Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup-en-Brie, Seine-et-Marne in 1908 and died the year, 2004.

This artist developed a strong fascination with painting early on, and especially with Surrealism. 

In 1932, after spending a year in the Ivory Coast, he discovered the Leica, which happened to become his camera of choice.

He then soon began a life-long passion for photography and in 1933, he had his first exhibition at the “Julien Levy Gallery” in New York. He later made films with Jean Renoir.
“To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart. It’s a way of life” ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Throughout the 20th century, Henri Cartier-Bresson has photographed Africa in the 1920’s, crossed the tragic fortunes of Spanish republicans, accompanied the liberation of Paris, caught Gandhi just hours before his assassination, and the victory of the communists in China.

“While other photographers work around shadows, Cartier-Bresson uses them as little jokes, surrealist tools, and moveable backdrops to transform ordinary street scenes into photographs that make us wonder “How come I did not see that?””

Instead of not, he uses shadows and light to his advantage, using them as defining elements visually, concluding the power of lighting subjects well. He found surrealism by using the shadows he finds as his subject as opposed to an “object”.

He finds a way of using subjects, getting them to stand near the shadows, creating an interesting effect, making the viewer believe that the subject had created the shadow and then wonder “how” it was done.

He uses black and white photography to his advantage as it shows the strong shadows consuming the image around the whites, in contrast, causing the viewer to see the relationship simply between light and dark.

He travelled a lot, which is the reason for his many different scenaries, telling stories in each image and one thing that he was renowned for was his work on what he calls “the decisive moment” which is when the person behind the camera decides to act, decides to take the photograph.

“To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.” – Bresson

“I believe that, for reactive living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us, which can mold us, but which can also be affected by us. A balance must be established between these two worlds: the one inside us, and the one outside us. As the result of a constant reciprocal process, both these worlds come to form a single one. And it is this world that we must communicate.”

I personally find “the decisive moment” extremely interesting, just like I did before, showing the events unfolding in front of our eyes, going out and taking photographs in the moment as opposed to them being planned, creating different subject matters in light and shadow, creating stories with the camera, which is exactly something I wanted to look at, going out and taking photographs. My photographs here are inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson, despite them not having a human in them, i liked the way that this photographer used buildings and scenery in their advantages, showing the difference in light and darkness, with slight hints in the images and the way the composition is placed, to give it more meaning to the audience. The decisive moment of the way light hits these places

I also took more images with the idea of the decisive moment and I am very happy with how my photographs turned out.