Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French photographer born in 1908. He started his career as a painter but continuously found this line of work dissatisfying and started to feel himself ever more drawn the fashionable, modern art of photography. He found with photography a way to express his views on the world.

 

Born into a wealthy family, Cartier-Bresson was able to experiment with photography and he was able to travel the world doing so. With this freedom, he was able to bring a new aesthetic and practice to photography.

 

Wanting to elaborate on his approach to photography, in 1952 a collection of images taken in the first few decades of his career were published in ‘The Decisive Moment’. This book explains Cartier-Bresson’s concept of the decisive moment and how photos should be a particular assembly of forms with accompanying awareness in a fraction of a second of the importance of an event.

 

Cartier-Bresson had a particular technique. He did not simply point and shoot. He would normally wait for the perfect moment to develop, firstly by composing a picture in the viewfinder and waiting for a moment to occur, usually a person passing through the frame. He also did not crop his images. A perfect example of this is his image, ‘Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare’. The leaping shape in the foreground grabs the viewer’s attention with their impending bad luck that cannot be avoided. In the background is a poster of a dancer leaping also, this brings a symmetry to the image, with each element in balance.

 

In 1947, Henri Cartier-Bresson co-found the renowned Magnum Photos along with fellow photographers, Robert Capa, David Seymour and George Rodger. Magnum was one of the first photographic agencies and was created to echo the founders independent characters and to allow them to work outside the directions of magazine journalism. With the founding of Magnum Photos Cartier-Bresson became one of the worlds most favoured photojournalists.

 

Throughout his career, Henri Cartier-Bresson published over thirty publications. He died in 2004.