Henri Cartier-Bresson

One of the most iconic artists in the history of photography, Henri Cartier-Bresson pioneered a modern, compelling style of candid street photography that championed spontaneity and humanity. His work blurred the lines between art and reportage, laying the foundations for photojournalism to become an accepted art form.

Known for working with a 35mm camera sometimes wrapped in black tape to make it less obtrusive, Cartier-Bresson wrestled himself into the aftermath of some of the 20th-century’s most momentous events, including the liberation of Paris from the Nazis, the partition of India and Pakistan, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and Stalin’s death in the Soviet Union. He was also an accomplished portrait photographer, taking influential images of the cultural icons Truman Capote, Alberto Giacometti, Albert Camus, Leonor Fini, Francis Bacon and Malcolm X.

Born in France in 1908, Cartier-Bresson began to move in Paris’s Surrealist circles in the early 1930s, befriending the author of the movement’s manifesto André Breton, as well as Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. Around the same time, he acquired a Leica camera — a new model small and subtle enough for him to act fast and with discretion.

In 1947, having spent three years of World War II in German labour camps, Cartier-Bresson co-founded the photojournalism agency Magnum Photos, allotting himself the task of documenting Asia.

Cartier-Bresson’s predilection for capturing life on the run was best expressed in the title of his first major book, published in 1952, called The Decisive Moment. ‘To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organisation of form which give that event its proper expression,’ he said. He also famously declined to alter his images, forgoing cropping or dark room manipulation techniques.

By the end of the 1960s, after decades spent travelling, Cartier-Bresson left Magnum and retired from photography. He founded the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation shortly before his death in 2004, aged 95.