Rouen

1920s

The Surrealists at the Café Cyrano

In the 1920s he began to socialise with the Surrealists at the Café Cyrano on the Place Blanche, met leading figures of the movement and was drawn to its use of the subconscious and the immediate; dissatisfied with his own experiments, he destroyed most of his early paintings.

1927

André Lhote’s academy: “photography without a camera”

In 1927 he entered a private art school and the Paris academy of the Cubist André Lhote, who took his pupils to the Louvre and to galleries; Cartier-Bresson later called Lhote his teacher of “photography without a camera”, and he also studied painting with the society portraitist Jacques-Émile Blanche.

1929–1930

Harry Crosby gives him his first camera

His squadron commander put him under house arrest for hunting without a licence, and the American expatriate Harry Crosby, who had him released into his custody for a few days, gave him his first camera; they took and printed pictures at Crosby’s home, Le Moulin du Soleil, in Ermenonville.

1930–1932

Blackwater fever and instructions for his own funeral

In Côte d’Ivoire he contracted blackwater fever, which nearly killed him; still feverish, he sent his grandfather instructions for his own funeral — in Normandy, at the edge of the Eawy Forest, with Debussy’s String Quartet played.

1930–1932

Escape to Africa: Côte d’Ivoire

After reading Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” in the army he decided to escape and seek adventure in Côte d’Ivoire; he lived by shooting game and selling it to villagers, and later carried methods learned hunting into his photography. Only seven photographs survived the tropics, although he had taken a portable camera smaller than a Brownie.

1931–1932

Munkácsi’s photograph, a Leica and the choice of photography

Recovering in Marseille, he saw Martin Munkácsi’s photograph “Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika” and “suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant”; he gave up painting and bought a Leica with a 50 mm lens, darkening its shiny parts to stay unnoticed.