Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) was one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century and the founding figure of modern photojournalism. Born in Chanteloup-en-Brie, France, into a prosperous textile family, he initially trained as a painter under the Cubist André Lhote in Paris and studied literature at Cambridge. His early years placed him at the heart of the Parisian avant-garde, and his friendships with André Breton and the Surrealists deeply informed his sensibility, encouraging his eye for the poetic accident and the psychologically charged encounter.

Cartier-Bresson discovered photography with a small Leica 35mm camera in the early 1930s, and the discreet, hand-held nature of the instrument allowed him to develop the intuitive, split-second approach that would define his practice. He articulated his working philosophy in the celebrated concept of the decisive moment, the exact instant at which the geometry of a scene and its human content converge into a single perfect image. His book Images à la Sauvette, published in English as The Decisive Moment in 1952, remains one of the foundational texts of modern photography.

Cartier-Bresson photographed some of the most consequential events of the twentieth century, including the last days of Gandhi, the fall of the Kuomintang in China, the coronation of King George VI, and the liberation of Paris. In 1947, he co-founded the Magnum Photos cooperative with Robert Capa, David Seymour, and George Rodger, establishing an independent model for photojournalism that continues today. Later in life he returned to drawing, and his archive is now maintained by the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris.