March 25, by Rob Cook. In this post as with others I have drawn heavily on the best sources I could find.
His personal friendship with Cartier-Bresson gave him an insight rarely seen in biographies. I based a lot of the structure of this sketch off of his biography. I watch, watch, watch. I understand things through my eyes. I love, love, love Henri Cartier-Bresson. I can sit for hours looking at his images and discover new things every time.
The man was brilliant!! To people who know a bit about everything, he was Cartier-Bresson. To those in the profession, HCB was enough. All of them have their own ideas as to who he was. Each of these helps to illuminate the tinge of madness, the genius, and the darker side. My view is a mosaic of all these ideas. This legendary character, regarded by some people as impossible, never indulged in self-promotion.
He was hardly ever seen on television, or heard on the radio, or featured in the press. He was perfectly happy to stay away from the nasty trappings that inevitably accompany fame, making no effort to correct the impression held by most people that he had died long ago. He was the personification of impatience, but was also full of curiosity, indignation, enthusiasm and bad temper. He was a frenetic thinker who could not keep still or control his own temperament β to him life was inseparable from movement.
His uniqueness was a source of difficulty, but he was one of those who give eccentricity a good name. Nothing afforded him greater private pleasure than deliberately to indulge in the aristocratic delight of annoying people.
