A fragmented portrait of the Indonesian wife of Henri Cartier-Bresson
Kunang Helmi wrote an incomplete portrait of Ratna “Elie” Mohini, the Indonesian wife of the renown photo journalist Henri Cartier-Bresson:
“Ratna Cartier-Bresson was born in Batavia in 1904 and spent her formative years on Java. She changed her name several times when she trained as a dancer in both traditional Javanese and modern contemporary dance forms while still in the Netherlands East Indies. Ratna was not only attractive, but also endowed with a quicksilver temperament and lively intelligence, accentuated by a great sense of humour. It was thus she appeared on the scene in the Paris of the 1930s where artists, writers and painters congregated in the cafés of Montparnasse. She was destined to make Paris her home for the rest of her life when she married the now famous photographer Henri Cartier- Bresson in 1937. Ratna was to die in 1988 far away from those islands bathed in sunlight where she had spent her youth. Her travels had taken her all over the globe during the struggle for indépendance of many new nations in Asia and Africa. A surprising and unusual life for a woman in the days when Indonesian women were very rarely seen outside of the former Dutch colony.”
(Helmi Kunang. Ratna Cartier-Bresson. A fragmented portrait. In: Archipel. Volume 54, 1997. pp. 253-268.)
To download the full article (1.3mb) click here.
By the way, I never received any notification that you were going to print my article. As photographers/publishers you may have heard of the principle of copyright!
Although I am happy that more people are reading about Ratna Cartier-Bresson, I would have appreciated an inquiry as to re-producing it on your site. (It is also mentioned in L’Archipel that the articles are subjected to copyright conditions.)
Anyway, I called this article Fragmented Portrait because at the time I was still undertaking research on the subject.
Kunang Helmi-Picard
By the way, why should I notify you if I do not print your article? As you can read above, I quote with full reference to your work. If you have a clue about copyright, you would know that this is absolutely not against any copyright of the author. I am not reproducing any parts of your work.
Since when would a report about a piece of writing require prior notification of the author? And by the way, I could not find your address information with the article anyway.
Your fragmented writing is free to download by anybody who wishes so, so why would you have to remind me of copyright laws here?
Thanks for dropping by and let me know, if I can do something for you.
Best,
Thomas