Henri Cartier-Bresson

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON (Chanteloup-en-Brie, France, 1908- Céreste, France, 2004).
"Jardins du Palais Royal, Paris, 1959.
Gelatin silver, later printing.
Signed and annotated "pour Tuto" in ink and photographer's copyright stamp in relief (in the margin).
Provenance: Reuben private collection, Chicago.
The Pompidou Center has a copy of this photograph.
Measurements: 37 x 25 cm (image); 41 x 31 cm (plate).

Thanks to his hand-held Leica camera, Henri Cartier-Bresson was able to move with ease as he wandered through new cities and foreign places, taking images that combined his bohemian spontaneity with his painterly sense of composition. This modus operandi became known as "the decisive moment," a famous concept that would influence photographers throughout the 20th century.

Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French artist and humanist photographer considered a master of photography and one of the first users of 35mm film. He pioneered the genre of street photography and considered photography as capturing a decisive moment. His first major reportage trip took him to the Ivory Coast in 1931.Photographs from his many travels quickly found a forum in magazines and exhibitions. He also gained experience in New York with Paul Strand. In the late summer of 1937, before the battle of Belchite, he traveled to Spain with Herbert Kline, former editor of New Theater magazine, and cameraman Jacques Lemare to shoot a documentary on the American Medical Bureau during the Spanish Civil War. They filmed at Villa Paz, the International Brigades hospital in Saelices, not far from Madrid, and on the coast of Valencia to document the recovery of wounded volunteers in the villas of Benicàssim. They also visited the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Quinto, near Zaragoza, and shot the film With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain. From 1937 to 1939, Cartier-Bresson was assistant director on three films by Jean Renoir, including The Rules of the Game. In 1940, he spent nearly three years as a prisoner of war in Germany. After it was erroneously assumed that he had died in the war, the Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated a major "posthumous" retrospective to Cartier-Bresson in 1947. That same year, together with Robert Capa, David Seymour and George Rodger, he founded the Magnum Photos agency in New York with the aim of preserving the rights to the photographers' work.Cartier-Bresson was the first photographer allowed to exhibit at the Louvre in Paris in 1955. His photographs were collected and published in Images à la sauvette (1952, Images in passing), D'une Chine à l'autre (1968, China yesterday and today) and Moscou (1955, Moscow), among others. Cartier-Bresson stopped taking professional photographs in 1972 and devoted himself intensely to the art of drawing. In 1974 he was elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.