After unsuccessfully trying to learn music, as a child Cartier-Bresson was introduced to oil painting by his uncle Louis who was gifted painter. Cartier-Bresson once said “Painting has been my obsession from the time that my father and Uncle took me into his studio during the Christmas holidays in 1913, when I was five years old. There I lived in the atmosphere of painting and inhaled the paintings. His Uncle Louis' painting lessons were cut short, when he died in World War 1.
In 1927, at the age of 19, Cartier-Bresson went to a private art school. Cartier-Bresson also studied painting with society portraitist Jacques Émile Blanche. Lhote took his pupils to the Louvre to study traditional artists and to Parisian galleries to study modern art. Cartier-Bresson's interest in modern art was combined with a respect for the works of masterpieces of Jan van Eyck, Paolo Uccello, Masaccio and Piero Della Francesca. Cartier-Bresson often regarded Lhote as his teacher of photography without a camera.
In 1930 Cartier-Bresson became inspired by Hungarian photojournalist Martin Munkacsi which showed three naked young African boys, caught in near-silhouette, running into the surf of Lake Tanganyika. Cartier-Bresson described the portrait as a photo that captured the freedom, grace and spontaneity of the boy’s movement and their joy at being alive. Cartier-Bresson said “the only thing which completely amazed me and brought me to photography was the work of Munkacsi. When I saw the photograph of Munkacsi of the black kids running in a wave I couldn't believe such a thing could be caught with the camera. I said damn it, I took my camera and went out into the street.”
The Munkacsi photograph inspired him to stop painting and to take up photography seriously. He explained, "I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant.” He learned the Leica camera with 50 mm lens in Marseilles and that would be the camera that would accompany him for many years. He described the Leica as an extension of his eye. The secrecy that the small camera gave him in a crowd or during an intimate moment was important in overcoming the formal and unnatural behavior of those who were aware of being photographed. He improved his secrecy by painting all shiny parts of the Leica with black paint. The Leica opened up new possibilities in photography, the ability to capture the world in its actual state of movement and transformation.
Cartier-Bresson prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce and ready to trap' life. Restless, he photographed in Berlin, Brussels, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and Madrid. His photographs were first exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1932, and next at the Ateneo Club in Madrid. In Mexico in 1934, he shared an exhibition with Manuel Alvarez Bravo.
In 1934 Cartier-Bresson met a young polish photographer named David Szymin who was called Chim this was because his name was difficult to pronounce. Szymin later changed his name to David Seymour. Through Chim, Cartier-Bresson met a Hungarian photographer named Endré Friedmann, who later changed his name to Robert Capa. In the early 1930’s the three shared a studio in the early 1930 where Capa mentored Cartier-Bresson. ”Don't keep the label of a surrealist photographer, be a photojournalist. If not you will fall into mannerism. Keep surrealism in your little heart, my dear. Don't fidget. Get moving.” This was the famous lines Capa told Cartier-Bresson.
Between 1937 and 1939 Cartier-Bresson worked as a photographer for the French communists evening paper Ce Soir.
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