H cartier bresson the master

The son of a wealthy textile merchant, Henri Cartier-Bresson studied painting at André Lhote’s academy in Montparnasse in 1927, and soon thereafter entered the bohemian world of the Parisian avant-garde.

In 1931, he began to use a camera and to make photographs that reveal the influence of Cubism and Surrealism—bold, flat planes, collagelike compositions, and spatial ambiguity—as well as an affinity for society’s outcasts and the back alleys where they lived and worked.

H cartier bresson the master

Within a year, he had mastered the miniature 35mm Leica camera and had begun traveling in Italy, Spain, Morocco, and Mexico, developing what would become one of the hallmarks of twentieth-century photographic style. Although he was influenced by such photographers as Eugène Atget and André Kertész (1894–1985), his photographic fusion of form and content was groundbreaking.

In his 1952 landmark monograph The Decisive Moment, he defined his philosophy: “To me, phot