Capa like most of his colleagues was troubled by the lack of photographers’ rights over their own work

Capa, like most of his colleagues, was troubled by the lack of photographers’ rights over their own work. “Capa and his friends,” remarked one commentator, “invented the photographer’s copyright.”Magnum was founded, by Capa, Cartier-Bresson, Seymour and Rita and William Vandivert at a meeting in the penthouse restaurant at the New York Museum of Modern Art in April 1947. Just a year earlier, Cartier-Bresson’s first major exhibition had opened at the Moma and, in 1952, the first of a series of monographs appeared, publications which would consolidate his international reputation. “The most difficult thing for me is a portrait,” he recalled. “You have to try and get your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.”Cartier-Bresson’s, Capa’s and Seymour’s experiences at Ce Soir, where photographers’ work was edited and cropped without consultation, were the basis for their determination to found a photographic agency owned and managed by photographers: a structure which remains firmly in place, at Magnum, to this day.The idea of the Magnum agency was proposed to Cartier-Bresson and David (Chim) Seymour by Robert Capa, the Hungarian-born photojournalist and war photographer whose career as a photographer in Spain and France, as well as his tragic death in Indochina, has become a photojournalistic legend. By the late Thirties (after assisting the director Jean Renoir on his 1936 films La Vie est ?ous, a.k.a.

The People of France, and Une partie de campagne, or A Day in the Country) he was making documentary films, including Victoire de la vie (“Return to Life”), his 1937 study of hospitals in the Republican strongholds of Spain, and, in 1938, L’Espagne vivra (“Spain Will Live”).The encroachment of Fascism in Europe, the enforced flight from France of many of Cartier-Bresson’s Jewish and leftist friends, made him even more politically committed. He worked, alongside Robert Capa and David Seymour (later to become founding members of Magnum) on the Communist Party’s newspaper Ce Soir, edited by Louis Aragon. It was while working at Ce Soir that Cartier-Bresson’s work emerged as the poetic photojournalism with which he is now so closely identified. He grew more and more interested in the notion of society and in photography’s ability to educate and expose.At the beginning of the Second World War he volunteered for the French army’s film and photographic corps, was captured and incarcerated before escaping, in 1943, to join the MNPGD, an underground organisation which aided escapees and prisoners.

Unable to travel, he began to make a series of photographs of writers and artists; his intense, questioning Forties portraits of Matisse, Braque, Bonnard and Picasso have remained some of photographic seminal documents. He exhibited again in 1935 in a two-man show with Manuel Alvarez Bravo at the Palacio de Bellas Artes de Mexico. Later that year, he returned to the United States, showing again at the Julien Levy Gallery (along with Walker Evans and Bravo). In the United States, he was exposed to the strength of the new politicised documentary of the American Depression, exemplified by Evans and the photographers commissioned by the Farm Security Administration and even more by the photographer/film-maker Paul Strand, with whom he studied in 1935.Had it not been for the outbreak of the Second World War, which finally formed him as a photographer, Cartier-Bresson might well have carved out a career as a film-maker.

Always acutely socially conscious, he was struck by the poverty and social inequity in the countries that he visited. His photographs soon attracted attention in critical circles, and his first exhibition was mounted at the Julian Levy Gallery in New York in 1933. That same year, his photographs were published in Arts et M?ers Graphiques.In 1934, Cartier-Bresson left Paris on a year-long ethnographic expedition to Mexico. The emergence of the miniature camera freed photography of the technical constraints of earlier, more cumbersome equipment. The Leica, discreet, easy to carry and simple to use, gave photographers the ability to make spontaneous images, to make high-quality photographs quickly and simply.Cartier-Bresson probably acquired his first Leica camera in the early Thirties and it became what he would describe as his sketchbook: “an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which – in visual terms – questions and decides simultaneously”. He became a compulsive traveller, spending a year on the Ivory Coast in 1931 and making many photographs.On his return from Africa he travelled throughout Europe in the company of the author Andr?ieyre de Mandiargues (who would later write the introduction to Cartier-Bresson’s A Propos de Paris, 1994) and the painter Leonor Fini.