Coronation of King George VI, 12 May 1937
In 1937, Henri Cartier-Bresson, aged 28, had been assisting Jean Renoir on feature films. He needed some income, however, not least because he had recently married Ratna Mohini, a Javanese dancer. In May, he was offered a staff photographer's job on the new Paris communist newspaper 'Ce soir'. His first assignment was to cover the coronation of George VI in London.
The readers of Ce Soir didn't have much interest in the pomp and circumstance of the event itself, so he kept his Leica trained on the crowds in Trafalgar Square, many of whom had slept overnight. The next morning, as the royal carriages approached, one man slept on.
