Henri Cartier-Bresson and His Printers

Picto and the creation of the HCB style

We all know Ansel Adams’ adage: “The negative is the score; the print is the performance.”[i] But we tend to forget that the great film photographers were never revered for their negatives, as composers are for their scores, but always for their prints — the performances.

The question is, what if these prints are made by someone else?

Henri Cartier-Bresson printed his own photographs in the 1930s and early 40s. Once he became well-known and a founding member of the Magnum Photos cooperative in 1947, he stopped. He never enjoyed printing anyway. Peter Galassi, in the catalog for HCB’s influential Museum of Modern Art retrospective of 1987 — Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Work — reveals that very few, and possibly none, of the exhibit’s prints were made by Cartier-Bresson himself, even though they came from the era when he did his own printing.

A retrospective that dismissed the artist’s own work was unheard of, especially at the time. Galassi was breaking new ground in the understanding of vintage photography.

Picto and the world according to Magnum

Almost all of the prints were made by Picto, a photo services company established in 1950 by Pierre Gassman, an émigré from Germany and a friend of Cartier-Bresson’s. At first, Picto was just six enlargers around a long tank tray. But it grew from there, propelled by Magnum’s needs…