His photographs have entered our collective memory, lodged there like signposts in the visual narrative of this century. However self-effacing he has become, Cartier-Bresson's pictures have Possibility through forgetting yourself of recording in a fraction of a second the emotion of a subject, and the beauty of the form." "My passionīeen for photography 'in itself,'" Cartier-Bresson wrote in 1994, "but for He seems bashful, almost shy, about his extraordinary talent lookingĪchievements, he refers to photography as a thing of the past. A number of these pictures will be on exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery starting October 29. And throughout his career he accumulated a stunning range of acquaintances, whom he photographed freely. Powerless and a city reflecting a beautiful light. He traveled the globe to India to document its emergence from colonialism, to China to shoot a revolution, to Washington to photograph the powerful and the Even in the heyday of mass-market magazines, in the 1940s and '50s, he made pictures that had the gravity of art. With it, he helped reinvent photojournalism after World War II.Īlthough he was an artist by training and outlook, Cartier-Bresson wasįounding members of Magnum Photos, a photographers' collaborative thatīecame, and remains, one of the world's premier picture agencies. But through five decades of extensive travel and significant friendships with artists, scientists and political figures all in pursuit of his vision Cartier-Bresson was not often without his Leica. Of people and landscapes, still observing the world around him. He now spends a great deal of time without his trusty Leica camera, For an artist renowned as one of the finest photographers of the human landscape, it seems especially revealing that today, at 91, Henri Cartier-Bresson likes to speak most about drawing and painting. His images are infused with a naturalness that emerges from the illumination of the world light reflecting what is real reconstituted in luminous, grainy, black-and-white. He is ultimately like a painter with a palette of light, a draftsman with