Martine Franck was a
photographer whose documentary-style portraits of artists and marginalized
populations alike helped her rise into the highest echelons of her profession
while fiercely protecting the artistic legacy of her husband, Henri Cartier-Bresson
The cause was
leukemia, her sister-in-law, Louise Baring, said.
Ms. Franck was an
exemplar of a school of postwar photography that aimed to capture the real
world. Her style was to work outside the studio, to use a 35-millimeter Leica
camera, and she preferred black-and-white film. She was drawn to fragile
populations like Tibetan boys who had been selected as reincarnated lamas and a
dying Gallic community on Tory Island, off Ireland.
She also returned
over and over to photographing well-known artists, among them the painter Marc
Chagall and the sculptor Étienne Martin. The poet Seamus Heaney was also a
subject.
“I think our
collective sense of the artistic and intellectual life of Paris in the second
half of the 20th century has been substantially enriched by” Ms. Franck’s
portraits, said Peter Galassi, who was director of photography at the Museum of
Modern Art until last year.
Ms. Franck was
born to Evelyn and Louis Franck in Antwerp, Belgium, on April 2, 1938. The
family moved almost immediately after her birth to London, where her father
worked as a banker. He was also a passionate art collector and took her to
galleries when she was young. She received a degree in art history from the
École du Louvre in Paris — studies, she said later, that convinced her that she
did not want an academic career.
She was a busy
freelance photographer in Paris in 1966, on assignment for magazines like
Vogue, Life and Sports Illustrated, and the official photographer for the
Théâtre du Soleil, when she met her future husband. Thirty years her senior,
Mr. Cartier-Bresson was already internationally renowned as the father of
photojournalism and a founder of Magnum Photos, a cooperative agency whose
members have included Robert and Cornell Capa, Elliott Erwitt, Bruce Davidson,
Philippe Halsman, W. Eugene Smith and Eve Arnold, who died in January.
“His opening line
was, ‘Martine, I want to come and see your contact sheets,’ ” she said of
Mr. Cartier-Bresson in a 2010 television interview with Charlie Rose. They were
married in 1970.
At first it was
difficult for Ms. Franck to preserve a separate identity, but she was
determined to do so. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph of London in
2007, she said that she and her husband rarely discussed photography or worked
together.
“He was both
critical and inspirational, but we had very different working methods,” she
said. “Henri preferred to discover things without a plan, while I like to find
and develop a particular theme.”
Ms. Franck had
limited her career so she could manage Mr. Cartier-Bresson’s affairs and rear
their daughter, Ms. Baring said, so she was not widely recognized until later
in life. She was one of the few women accepted at Magnum as a full member, in
1983; another milestone was her first solo show, at the Maison Européenne de la
Photographie, in 1998.
Whatever the
challenges of living with Mr. Cartier-Bresson’s fame, Ms. Franck remained
devoted to his work and legacy. She was the force behind the creation of the
Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, a private exhibition space in Paris that
houses his archive and polices how his images are used by others.
Mr.
Cartier-Bresson died in 2004, and Ms. Franck never remarried. She is survived
by her brother, Eric Franck, who owns a fine-art gallery in London; her
daughter, Mélanie; and three grandchildren.
Ms. Franck told The Daily
Telegraph that she had been attracted to photography because she was shy. “I
realized that photography was an ideal way of telling people what is going on
without having to talk,” she said. nytimes
All images © Martine Franck /
Magnum Photos
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