Henri Cartier-Bresson Exhibit at the MOMA

“It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us” – Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1952

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) is one of the most original, accomplished, influential, and beloved figures in the history of photography. His inventive work of the early 1930s helped define the creative potential of modern photography, and his uncanny ability to capture life on the run made his work synonymous with “the decisive moment”—the title of his first major book. After World War II (most of which he spent as a prisoner of war) and his first museum show (at MoMA in 1947), he joined Robert Capa and others in founding the Magnum photo agency, which enabled photojournalists to reach a broad audience through magazines such as Life while retaining control over their work. In the decade following the war, Cartier-Bresson produced major bodies of photographic reportage on India and Indonesia at the time of independence, China during the revolution, the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death, the United States during the postwar boom, and Europe as its old cultures confronted modern realities. For more than twenty-five years, he was the keenest observer of the global theater of human affairs—and one of the great portraitists of the twentieth century. MoMA’s retrospective, the first in the United States in three decades, surveys Cartier-Bresson’s entire career, with a presentation of about three hundred photographs, mostly arranged thematically and supplemented with periodicals and books. The exhibition travels to The Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. – MOMA.Com


Henri Cartier -Bresson
The Modern Century
April 11 – June 28 2010
Museaum of Modern Art
Sixth Floor
www.MOMA.Org

4 comments ↓

#1 elise on 07.22.10 at 11:55 pm

Big fan of this guy, great article :)

#2 Mirna on 03.14.12 at 3:55 pm

Is that horse picture also of Cartier-Bresson? It’s so nice!

#3 Randy on 04.19.13 at 5:27 pm

Love this photographer and ‘the decisive moment’ he captures so well. (But the picture of the woman with the dog on the beach is really a photo from 2007 by Lithuanian-born Andrej Vasilenko on a beach at Nida. The girl is Miglė Narbutaitė, at the time a fellow photography student at the Vilnius Academy of Art. The picture was shot with a Fujica using a 50mm Russian Industar lens. He’s terribly frustrated that people keep crediting Cartier-Bresson)

#4 Yogendra Jung Basnet on 02.26.14 at 9:55 pm

Great photographer need to be celebrate his birth day world wide by the photojournalist .

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