Simone de Beauvoir or A photograph like a visit to the dentist
Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908 - 2004) learned film from Jean Renoir, traveled to Africa, Mexico, India, China, the Soviet Union with his Leica camera. He met Gandhi, Fidel Castro and the Dalai Lama. He was taken into captivity, photographed for and as the French Résistance. And was co-founder of the Magnum agency.
Famous photographs of Roland Barthes, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir stem from his camera. But in his disregard for the fame from those he was very similar to Sartre, who 1964 did reject the Nobel Prize for literature. "When a medieval sculptor created work, it had the same value for him, whether it was exhibited at the gateway of a cathedral or in the towers where nobody else got to see it than God."
These words are translated from the collection of rare interviews with Cartier-Bresson, which were published 2020 by the German publisher Schirmer Mosel under the title "Henri Cartier-Bresson. Man redet immer zu viel. Gespräche über das Leben, die Kunst und die Photographie. 1951-1998". ("They always talk too much. Conversations on Life, Art and Photography") It contains very personal impressions into the thinking and feeling of this photographic icon.
There are two stunning, philosophical cords originating from him that can be exposed. On the one hand he gathered profound inspiration for his own work in Zen Buddhism. Eugene Herrigel's book "Zen and the Art of Archery" might have initiated this. The French painter Georges Braques gave it to him as a present in the mid sixties.
Similar lighted traces may his meetings with most of the French existentialists in the 1950s have meant.
Simone de Beauvoir, Paris, 1947 © Henri Cartier-Bresson
Among them Madame de Beauvoir! The legend goes like this: when Cartier-Bresson met Madame de Beauvoir in front of her apartment in the fourteenth Arrondissement in Paris, she asked, how long it would take. He answered, "longer than a visit to the dentist, but shorter than psychotherapy."
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