HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON

Libération de Paris, 1944 Épreuve retenue par la fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson Liberation of Paris, 1944 Print held at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation When Robert Capa introduced me to HCB a few days after the Paris liberation to make the rounds?including lunch at his parents' home on rue Lisbonne? he never told me that he too had taken pictures of the liberation. Perhaps he had yet to develop his film. Paris was finally liberated on Friday, the 25th of August, 1944. I am proud to say that all six of the Life photographers who had posed with me in Grosvenor Square just before D-Day entered Paris on that great day - Capa with General Leclerc's 2nd Armored Division. I edited their photos in London, then managed to get orders to go to Paris, landing in a small plane in a pasture in Normandy on Tuesday, the 29th. I then hitch-hiked to Paris, on a succession of Army jeeps and command cars. At three in the morning I checked into the Hotel Scribe, the new headquarters of the Allied press. The Time & Life office was temporarily established in a room on the first floor of the Scribe. That wasn't good enough for our Chief Correspondent Charles Wertenbaker, who stayed at the Lancaster and soon negotiated with Guaranty Trust, for an entire floor in their building overlooking the Place de la Concorde. My office looked down on the entrance to Maxim's. Not bad. I had never been in Paris before. Capa, an old Parisian hand, took pity on me. He said,"I have a friend who can help you. He speaks English, he knows everybody, he escaped from the Germans and was in the Resistance. His name is Henri Cartier-Bresson." I had never heard of him, but a well-dressed young man with a bicycle was at the door of the Scribe the next morning. We spent the day together. I had hoped to become Life's postwar Paris bureau chief but was beaten to it by Elmer Lower, who had had the foresight to marry a French girl. After six weeks in Paris I had to return to London, but made it home to New York bef