Black and white photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson depicting a group of children through a hole in a white wall, playing in a mound of rubble in Seville. Spain, 1933.

Black and white photograph of boys at play, taken through a hole in a wall.

Henri Cartier-Bresson began to take photographs seriously in 1931 when he bought a Leica (hand held) camera. Within three days he had mastered the camera and did not essentially change his working technique from that point onwards. He does not use flash equipment, tripods or reflectors, neither does he develop or print his own photographs, relying wholly on his comprehension of the image at the point of taking the photograph.

In 1933 he went to Italy and Spain. In 1934 he exhibited with Manuel Alvarez Bravo in Mexico, where he spent the whole of that year. In 1936 he returned to France and became an assistant to the film director Jean Renoir. He was drafted into the army in 1940, was captured and held in German labour camps, successfully escaping on his third attempt. He worked for the Resistance movement in Paris until the end of the war. In 1947 he founded the Magnum photo agency with Robert Capa, David Seymour and George Rodger. The following year he travelled in East Asia, taking photographs in India, Burma, Indonesia, Iran, Egypt and China, returning to Europe in 1950.

In 1952 the term ‘decisive moment’, the phrase most often used to describe Cartier-Bresson’s photographs, was coined. It does not refer to the capturing of a historic moment, or to storytelling, which is not what Cartier-Bresson is representing in his photographs. The phrase, derived from Zen Buddhism, is applied to his technique to mean the moment (which he photographs) when his internal sense of form is expressed. Form, a strong sense of geometry, is highly visible in Cartier-Bresson’s photographs and it is as if the drama of his images takes care of itself. Cartier-Bresson continues to take photographs but since the 1970s has spent more of his time sketching and drawing.

This image was taken in Seville at the beginning of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s career as a photographer. It has a strong geometric form. The viewer sees the gang of boys through a large hole in a wall which frames the scene. Without knowing the date of the image one might guess that it was taken during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) or afterwards. The fact that it was taken in 1933 gives it a strange sense of premonition; the boys are playing at war in the ruins of a war that has not yet happened.

PH.582-1978