Portraits of an artist

Henri Cartier-Bresson turned the 'decisive moment' into some of the greatest photos of the century.

He is a legend among photographers, and even people who don't recognize his name have seen his pictures.

Henri Cartier-Bresson is hands down one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century -- possibly the greatest of all time.

Who else has photographed such an array of people, places and events as the 91-year-old Cartier-Bresson, who has been taking pictures since he first picked up a camera in the 1930s?

Cartier-Bresson's astounding output, spanning nearly 70 years of the present century, is an encyclopedic visual record of our age. He has photographed people of every race, religion, creed and political persuasion on Earth as well as legions of the important artists, writers, thinkers and statesmen of the last 60 years.

Yet it's not the sheer quantity of his picture-making that astounds, but the magically lifelike quality that seems to animate everyone who ever fell under the gaze of his lens.

Cartier-Bresson photographed people in the 1930s who, despite their dated fashions, seem as vitally connected to today as do the celebrities splashed on the covers of this month's glossy magazines.

It's the astonishing vitality of Cartier-Bresson's vision that is the real subject of "Tete a Tete: Portraits by Henri Cartier-Bresson," an extraordinary exhibition at Washington's National Portrait Gallery of 70 photographs culled from a lifetime's fascination with people and places.

The son of a wealthy French manufacturer, Cartier-Bresson showed artistic talent at an early age and studied painting as a young man. Through his social connections, he was able to meet many leading artists and writers in Paris during the 1920s.

But his interest in painting began to wane in the early 1930s, and he took up the camera instead, selling his photos to the early mass-circulation picture magazines. It was during this period that Cartier-Bresson met two other gifted young photojournalists, Robert Capa and David Seymour.

After service in the French army during World War II, Cartier-Bresson resumed working as a photojournalist. In 1947, he, Capa and Seymour set up their own picture agency, the Paris-based Magnum Photos, to market their work. Cartier-Bresson embarked on a globe-trotting career that soon made him one of the world's most celebrated photojournalists.

During the course of these travels, he photographed Matisse with his canaries, Faulkner with his hunting dogs, a harried-looking Martin Luther King with piles of sermons and speeches on his desk, and a bare-chested Robert F. Kennedy sunbathing with his son.

There is a youthful portrait of writer Truman Capote, taken in the 1940s, in which the artist, clad in white T-shirt and jeans, seems to share the same provocative sensuality as the large, drooping leaves of the fantastic subtropical plants that frame the picture.

Revealing character

Despite the differences in temperament among his subjects, Cartier-Bresson had a genius for capturing them in unguarded moments when the carefully composed persona of celebrity and fame slips aside to reveal the private face behind the public mask.

In this regard he could not be further from present-day celebrity portraitists like Annie Leibovitz, whose flashy commercial style, currently displayed a few blocks away at a Corcoran Gallery of Art exhibition, seems all surface and glitter compared with Cartier-Bresson's quiet insightfulness.

Cartier-Bresson has been from the beginning a master of what he called "the decisive moment," the precise instant at which intuition, experience and empathy combine with the fleeting harmonies of light and shadow to reveal the beauty or significance of everyday life.

He approached the world with the eye and heart of an artist. "What is more fugitive than a facial expression?" he asked in the preface to his 1968 book, "The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson."

"Faced with the camera, people proffer their best 'profile' to posterity. It is their hope, blended with a certain magic fear, to outlive themselves in this portrait -- and here they give us a foothold."

For Cartier-Bresson, that tiny foothold was all he needed. A good portrait was, in his way of seeing, "a synthesis of the whole personality" of the sitter. And that synthesis was something that could be achieved only by the photographer allowing himself to be completely caught up in the encounter.

His method was remarkably simple in its essentials. He painted his Leica camera black to make it less conspicuous and mostly used a normal or medium wide-angle lens that mimicked the perspective of the human eye.

Cartier-Bresson never "composed" his subjects beforehand, but rather arranged himself in relation to what was in front of him. He rejected contrived backgrounds, elaborate lighting set-ups and other tricks of the celebrity photographer's trade. He never used a flashgun, trick lenses, or even a tripod, dismissing pictures that resulted from such techniques as so much photographic tomfoolery.