Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004), French photographer, known for his reportage work. He was born in Chanteloup and educated at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris. Originally interested in painting, he took up photography in 1930. Starting in 1931, Cartier-Bresson traveled widely; the many photographs he took on his trips have been published in newspapers, magazines, and books, and his work has been exhibited frequently.

Cartier-Bresson excelled in composition without cropping his negatives, and he had a unique ability to capture the fleeting moment in which the subject's significance is revealed in form, content, and expression. He termed this the decisive moment. “For me the camera is a sketchbook, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which—in visual terms—questions and decides simultaneously,” he once said.

During World War II (1939-1945) Cartier-Bresson spent 35 months in German prison camps. After three attempts, he escaped and made his way to Paris. There he joined a photographic unit of the Resistance in France that recorded the German occupation and retreat. In 1945 he directed the documentary film Le retour (The Return) for the United States Office of War Information.

In 1947 Cartier-Bresson had a one-person exhibition of his photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The same year he was a founder of Magnum Photos, the first cooperative photo agency, which provided periodicals with photographs taken by top photographers working worldwide. Under the agency's aegis, Cartier-Bresson began to both travel and focus more on reportage photography. In 1955 he was invited to become the first photographer to exhibit at the Louvre in Paris. Among the published collections of his photographs are The Decisive Moment (1952), The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson (1968), and Henri Cartier-Bresson (1980).