Cartier-Bresson and Me: Part 4
Cartier-Bresson and Me: Part 4
Cartier-Bresson’s great skill in knowing when to press the shutter was matched by his luck with launching himself in the era of the big picture magazines. Particularly after World War II his photographs appeared in the pages of Life (1948-1963), Paris Match (1949-1962), Saturday Evening Post (1948-1951), and Der Stern (1955-1963), among others. In 1947 he founded Magnum, the premier agency for photojournalists, with Robert Capa, George Rodger, William Vandivert, and David Symore (a.k.a. “Chim”).
My timing was less fortuitous. I began photographing in the twilight of photojournalism of the Magnum sort. [Life Magazine published its last weekly edition in December 29, 1972.] I had only my own resources and my readiness to go out on “self-assignment,” occasionally accompanied with a letter of introduction from a magazine like The Nation or Harper’s Magazine. I became a photojournalist without a journal.
I traveled extensively and usually at my own expense. In 1972 I made a personal study of Israel from its northern-most tip at the Lebanese border, down to Sharm El Sheikh at the very end of the Sinai Peninsula. I visited a Palestinian refugee camp near Nablus in the West Bank. I stayed in an agricultural moshav (collective) on the Golan Heights, following along behind the Israeli cowboys tending their cattle on horseback. And there was the 10,000-mile circuit around North America following the rodeo circuit. From that adventure came an article published in Prague and Moscow with the English title “Hang Loose, Hold Tight.” All with my camera at hand under the banner of Cartier-Bresson.
I found one subject that held a special passion for me: blues music. And among blues musicians one in particular was my constant concern: B.B. King. I met B.B. near the beginning of my photographic career in 1968. We became friends at once, something many people experienced on meeting him. The story of how this friendship became a book is long and winding. In 1980 Doubleday published The Arrival of B.B. King, the Authorized Biography of the Foremost Blues Singer and Guitarist of Our Time. Doubleday was the 53rd publisher on the long list of publishers that received my proposal for such a book. It contains over 100 photos including 80+ of mine. One of my photos became an icon for the B.B. King Museum which opened in Indianola, Mississippi in 2008. The profile of B.B. King, arms outstretched appears on Museum merchandise: t-shirts, caps, coffee mugs, shot glasses, etc.
In 2017 the new Museum of Mississippi History opened in Jackson, MS. This photo appears as a mural on one wall of the main hall, rendered in relief.
[Go on to Part 5]
