Transcript of Video Interviews

MARTINE FRANK

Many years before Henri died we spoke about organising and creating a foundation and it took us a long time to find the right lawyer, to find the right notary who could help us organise the foundation, because in France it is quite difficult to put in place a foundation that is recognized as of public use. It was very much, I think, his wish that this be done, on the condition that the foundation would exhibit other things of his own work. I think he felt it very important that the foundation should be open towards other photographers or draughtsmen or painters and so this was actually stipulated in the laws of the foundation and fortunately, we were able to create it before he died and it opened about a year before he died so at least he had the pleasure of seeing the foundation as it is today. Henri started as a painter. He worked with Andre Lhote who is a very famous teacher. He was a fairly good cubist painter but he was a much better teacher, I think than a painter and Henri studied with him before the war and then he started taking photographs and making films.

There was a moment in his career where he hesitated to continue photographing. I think he really wondered if he wasn’t going to become a filmmaker after having worked with Paul Strand. But he realised having worked with Jean Renoir that he didn’t know how to tell a story in film and that in fact, if he was going to be a filmmaker, he could only become a documentary film maker and I think he finally decided that the camera, the still camera was more suited to his way of expression, it was closer to drawing and it was closer to painting which I think was his formation.

The scrapbook Henri showed me I think, was about 15 years before he died. It was tucked away in a suit case that had been at his mother’s house until she died and he put it on our bookshelf and he would take it out from time to time and say "you know Martine this is what I have, it is most precious, take good care of it"' and so I did. In fact in the end, we decided, my daughter and I, that it should be part of the foundation. I realised the significance of the scrapbook because it was very much his choice of what he considered as his best photographs at a certain time, and I think this is invaluable. I mean not all the photographs that he printed were actually stuck into the album but its interesting to see the different versions that led to the ultimate version that afterwards was used in the Museum of Modern Art in the 1947 exhibit and basically what he stuck in the album was the basis of that exhibition. But the interesting thing is that he actually printed them all himself and this was the last time that he did any printing. He didn’t really like printing but this was very quickly after the war and there was very little paper and, there were problems of getting anything printed at all so he had to do it himself. And then he went to the States with his little prints under his arm and bought a scrapbook and stuck them in the scrap book and showed them to the Museum of Modern Art.

The idea to create an exhibition from the original scrapbook was actually Agnes Sire's. I think she realised the historical importance of this album and the fact that he had already started taking out the prints from the album because the papers that they were stuck on were disintegrating. He personally realised that it was important to save these prints but unfortunately he did this without my knowledge and we didn’t photograph all the pages as they were originally. He just, he was a very impetuous man - "tear them out the scrapbook" - so we had to have them restored and all the glue taken off and the paper. Fortunately there are a few pages left, which are exhibiting the original way of how he actually presented the album.

AGNES SIRE

One day I discovered those pages with a few images on, and I asked Martine what it is and she said "well it’s an album that he prepared for his exhibition at MoMA that was in 1947, at the beginning of the year and he did himself all the prints". It was just after he escaped from prisoners' camps in Germany and he decided to have a look at all what he has been doing. So I told Martine well, we should have a double glance at that, it would be fantastic to try to publish it as it was and to show it because it was exactly the moment when Henri Cartier-Bresson didn’t know what he would doing after the war. Just before the war he had decided that he would become a filmmaker. Then the war arrived. Just before the war he did a few films with Jean Renoir and, 2 films about the Spanish civil war and then the war arrived and he was not willing really to do photography as a photojournalist. It was not his main interest. So, after 3 years in captivity he came back to France. His Leica was buried somewhere. He took it out from the ground and he met a guy whose name was Braun who told him "You like paintings, you like writers, why don’t you photograph many people for me, like Picasso, Matisse, Braque and all those people, because I want to do little books with portraits of artists and writers". So, Henri was very interested but, he has false papers - obviously because he escaped - and he was in hiding. So it was very difficult to know he was alive. So at the same time the MoMA is thinking that he had disappeared during the war, so that they would be doing a posthumous exhibition of his work and to be able to do such an exhibition they had to dig in the States for all the prints which possibly were bought by people. He had already 2 exhibitions in the States, one in 1933 and one in 1935 at the Julien Levy gallery and during those 2 exhibitions he had sold some prints. So, MOMA did a list of what was in the States and then suddenly thanks to David Seymour (co-founder of Magnum), they understood that Henri Cartier-Bresson was alive. So they wrote to Henri Cartier-Bresson and you can see all the letters in the scrapbook reproduction saying “Well, we will be happy to do a show with your work”. So Henri was really pleased and said "Okay I am very, very honoured, but I need to do a new edition because what you have in the States finishes in 1964 with my Mexican photographs, but now I have done many other things. So, I have to do the edit and prepare it". Okay, fantastic, everything was on. No paper in France. It was, no photographic paper. It was war so Munro Wheeler as the director of MoMA said "well I’ll send you the papers but you have to print the definitive prints for the exhibition because we cannot pay more". So he began to print. He didn’t like to print. He began to print and finally he found David Seymour who was working in a laboratory in New York said "Well go on printing but we may do other prints while you are in New York for your show. I can help you". So he did I don’t remember right now, almost 400 prints to prepare his scrapbook and then he took a boat with his wife, arrived in New York. Bought this famous scrapbook, had taken the images in it to present them to the museum to prepare the exhibition.

MARTINE FRANK

I think the scrapbook tells us a lot about Cartier-Bresson in so much as this was a key moment in his life. It was just after the war. He had been photographing for about 20 years and it was just before the beginning of Magnum. It was just before the exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art. So it was really the moment where he was looking back on what he had already done and choosing what he thought was his best work so from that point of view, I think it is invaluable.

AGNES SIRE

So many photographers have seen this exhibition and say it is another vision of the guy. They were so fed up with this bloody 'decisive moment' and those pictures of one girl specifically there in the stairs at the proper moment at the proper place. This is boring. What is interesting is to see you know, how you work, how you hesitate. Its very interesting and also, you see how he was working and this is....you know, now you know more, because young photographers they filmed, are filmed, and you know on Cartier-Bresson there were not so many (films) and there were these legends of the guy of the decisive moments and in fact, it’s undecisive moments that make this show.