Sympathy for a Photographer

Henri Cartier-Bresson, a man of wealth and taste widely regarded as the father of modern photojournalism, has died at the age of 95. Odds are if you happened to run into Cartier-Bresson, you would best be served by leaving the country immediately. He covered the Spanish Civil War and the Battle for France as the blitzkrieg raged during WWII, during which he was captured as a prisoner of war. He escaped and captured vivid images of the French resistance and the liberation of Paris as the bodies stank. He was around when Mahatma Gandhi was killed before he reached Bombay, covering his assassination and funeral in 1948. He was in Beijing when he saw it was time for a change, chronicling the last 6 months of Nationalist China, the fall of Beijing to Chairman Mao, and the first 6 months of Communist China. Cartier-Bresson also was the first foreign journalist allowed into the Soviet Union, a year after the death of Josef Stalin. In all, his images from 23 countries graced the covers of countless magazines. Ironically, Cartier-Bresson was a shy man, preferring his time behind the camera to that in front of it, and there are few photographs of him. He even went so far as to hide behind a sheet of paper when receiving an honorary doctorate at Oxford University in 1975. He will now be eligible for his second posthumous exhibition as the first was held in 1947, presented by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who had thought he was dead, failing to realize he would be around for a long, long year.