A New Home for the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris

Henri Cartier-Bresson was a photojournalism pioneer, a man whose wartime images of Europe and portraits of personalities like Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett have become 20th-century classics.

Yet he never allowed himself to be photographed, and he never appeared on television.

“It meant that his face wasn’t widely recognizable, and that he could blend in everywhere he went, without people knowing it was him,” said Agnès Sire, artistic director of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, which was established in 2003.

One of his only known self-portraits, taken on a trip to Siena, Italy, is a view of his extended right leg, in trousers, with a winding road in the background. The so-called self-portrait was taken “as he was lying on a wall,” Sire said.

“The subject is completely banal: That’s what’s interesting about it,” she continued. “It’s a private moment — not a moment where you’re posing for a double-page spread in Paris Match magazine.”

The Siena picture is one of about 50,000 original prints that have moved from Montparnasse, on the Left Bank of Paris, to the foundation’s new and bigger home on the Right Bank, in the fashionable Marais district. More than 200,000 negatives and contact sheets have also been relocated.

The new foundation building on Rue des Archives has twice as much exhibition space and three times as much archive space. It will organize four exhibitions a year (instead of the former three), as well as talks and educational programs, and cost 1 million euros (about $1.155 million) per year to run, according to the foundation’s new director, François Hébel, who previously led the Arles photography festival.

The funds come from an endowment left by photographer Martine Franck, Cartier-Bresson’s widow, who died in 2012. She is the focus of the inaugural exhibition at the foundation’s new location, which opens Nov. 6.

“Our original location in Montparnasse was a little off track for visitors to Paris on short stays,” said Hébel, noting the new location’s proximity to such tourist favorites as the Picasso Museum and the Pompidou Center.

The new building will also allow the foundation to show Cartier-Bresson’s own work all the time, in addition to solo exhibitions of the work of other photographers.

“Before, we would sometimes disappoint occasional visitors, because we were called ‘Fondation Cartier-Bresson,’ and yet there were no prints of Cartier-Bresson on display,” Hébel said. “Now, we’ll make sure there’s always something by him to see: whether it’s a small show, a very big one or a few prints from the archives.”

Cartier-Bresson was born into a well-to-do French family in 1908 — his father was a textile manufacturer — so he was able to make a career of photography from an early age. He discovered the Leica camera in the early 1930s and immediately put it to use in Spain; he also shot documentaries of the Spanish Civil War.

In World War II, he joined the army and was captured by the Germans in 1940 but escaped three years later. In 1947, he founded the Magnum agency with Robert Capa, another eminent 20th-century photojournalist. By then, his reputation was assured — he had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York the same year. Truman Capote, who was famously photographed in a white T-shirt by Cartier-Bresson, recalled seeing him “on a street in New Orleans — dancing along the pavement like an agitated dragonfly, three Leicas swinging from straps around his neck, a fourth one hugged to his eye: click-click-click (the camera seems a part of his own body), clicking away with a joyous intensity, a religious absorption.”

Sire, who knew Cartier-Bresson and Franck well, said he “was restless, always restless.”

“It’s as if a mosquito was biting him all the time,” she continued, “and he was itching to do something.”

By the late 1960s, after decades of globe-trotting, Cartier-Bresson had hung up his camera and taken up drawing and painting. Sire said that he especially liked to draw skeletons inside the Natural History Museum in Paris. “I once asked him why,” she said, “and he said, ‘Because they don’t move.'”

In 1970, Cartier-Bresson married Belgian-born Franck, a photographer 30 years younger than he. She was his second wife, and their marriage lasted until his death in August 2004, at the age of 95. By then, the foundation that bore his name was already open; Franck had made sure that it was inaugurated in his lifetime.

Franck became a photojournalist at a time when the field had few women, especially within the Magnum agency. She witnessed, and illustrated, the feminist movement around the world and pictured women in their workplaces — bank clerks, models, strippers, cleaners.

Years later, Franck produced a series on women in traditionally male jobs: electricians, train drivers, fisherwomen.

Before her death, she worked on the Cartier-Bresson Foundation’s exhibition of her work, choosing the pictures and deciding on the chronological presentation, as if visitors were leafing through a book of her life. She also gave an interview that is published in the catalog.

What was it like being Cartier-Bresson’s wife?

“He didn’t crush her at all: He actually encouraged her enormously,” Sire said. “There wasn’t really a rivalry between them, because while he was world-famous, and there were books of his photography coming out all the time, he no longer took photographs, except for a few portraits of friends. The way was clear for her.”

Besides hosting shows, talks and educational programs, the foundation is also the custodian of the Cartier-Bresson estate. Most of the prints and negatives in the archives are inalienable, meaning that they cannot be sold or tampered with.

Only a small quantity of signed prints is available for potential sale in the event that the foundation requires funding.

What does Cartier-Bresson’s legacy represent in an age in which photography has become banal, digitalized and universally undertaken by everybody with a cellphone?

“I think photography has never been so cheery,” Hébert said. “When I started in this field 40 years ago, the average household, according to Kodak, took two film rolls a year, or about 30 pictures. Amateur photography was pitiful. Today, even unconscious amateur photography has improved vastly: We know how to frame images better, we’re more conscious of what we do.”

Hébert said the world had become “submerged,” with images spreading via the internet. But “there’s no need to have scorn for that,” he said. It is the job of foundations like his to help educate the public.