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Henri Cartier-Bresson Was the Master Hunter of the Human Expression

The photographer said he was "peeking through a gap in the fence" when the Parisian tried to jump over a puddle in 1932. (Henri Cartier-Bresson - Magnum Photos)

Henri Cartier-Bresson was such a young man all his life, all his 95 years -- how could he die?

He was such a graceful athlete, such an instantaneous master of photographs taken at what he called "the decisive moment" -- of the scowl on the face of a woman in a museum, of both the menace and calculating perception on the face of elfin, young Truman Capote, of a hazy landscape, of boys larking around in rubble, a wave breaking, a man failing to leap across a puddle.

Such a masterpiece of composition that man is -- his leaping legs and their reflections, beneath a fence and rooftops with the modern geometric fillips of something like curling barrel hoops in the water next to a ladder.

Cartier-Bresson could do it all at once -- the moment, the humanity, the joke, the squalor and the formal composition. He was a giant in an Age of Giants and he was close to the last of them, a legend.

Cartier-Bresson was the King of Now, and when you look back at his pictures from 70 years ago you don't remember something -- you experience it, as if you were seeing it for the first time. He died on Tuesday in France, but the pictures live on, not as souvenirs or documents of Then, but as things happening Now.

"All photographs taken today are either directly or indirectly influenced by Cartier-Bresson," said Philip Brookman, curator of photography and media arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

All! What an amazing legacy! Cartier-Bresson changed the way we all played the photography game, most certainly the photojournalists and documentarians of modern photography, but also the art photographers who have ceased to use time as a medium, instead favoring posed pictures that are ironic confections of surface and self-reference.

To all of them, Cartier-Bresson showed the possibility of not only perfection, but epiphany, of art that reveals the cusp, the tipping point, the crack in the clouds, the shock of recognition.

He photographed the sort of odd moments you remember, and wonder why -- the official wariness of a potbellied Spanish cop dealing with a pedestrian, the seen-too-much face of a disheveled old New England woman who wears an American flag around her neck.

These moments are parts representing a whole reality we can sense but not explain. Cartier-Bresson taught seeing, and how to think about it. He also believed that reality existed as relationships -- even between people and themselves, alone in cafes; and between people and each other, or between them and him, a universe of fabulous accidents.

He was the rebellious son of a family made wealthy by the textile business. He studied painting, he took snapshots, he traveled. Then he discovered the little 35mm Leica camera that freed serious photographers from tripods and let them wander the world in the spirit of spontaneity and freedom. No more freezing the world into Grecian urn eternities.

How strange this seemed.

Historian Beaumont Newhall has noted that when Cartier-Bresson first showed at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1933, an announcement described his pictures as "antigraphic photography." Newhall goes on: "The impression arose that the photographs had been taken almost automatically and that they owed their strange and provocative beauty to chance; they were described as 'equivocal, ambivalent, anti-plastic, accidental.' "

Cartier-Bresson was doing it all on purpose.