©Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup-en-Brie, near Paris, France, on August 22, 1908.  He owned a Box Brownie as a boy, using it for taking holiday snapshots, and later experimented with 3x4 camera. He also studied painting for two years in a Paris studio. This early training in art helped develop the subtle and sensitive eye for composition, which was one of his greatest assets as a photographer.   

Cartier-Bresson was the founder of street photography and considered to be the father of modern photojournalism, an early adopter of 35mm format, and the master of candid photography. Many of his photographs are known for capturing decisive moments within everyday life. His style has inspired many photographers throughout history and present time.

“To take a photograph means to recognize – simultaneously and within a fraction of a second– both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that gives it meaning. It is putting one’s head, one’s eye, and one’s heart on the same axis.” Said Cartier-Bresson.

In 1952, Cartier-Bresson published his book Images à la sauvette, whose English edition was titled The Decisive Moment. It included a portfolio of 126 of his photos from the East and the West.

"In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject," he wrote in ‘The Decisive Moment’. "The little human detail can become a leitmotif." Most of his photography is a collection of such little human details, concerned images with universal meaning and suggestion. He lived in a haunted world where mundane facts, a reflection in a mud-puddle, an image chalked on a wall, the slant of a black-robed figure against mist, radiate significance at once familiar and only half-consciously grasped. His was an anti-romantic poetry of vision, which finds beauty in "things as they are," in the reality of here and now.