Henri Cartier-Bresson travelled the world for four decades, both documenting and participating in the art, political, and social movements that would move twentieth-century culture from the old to the modern world. Originally a student of Surrealist painting, Cartier-Bresson was advised by Gertrude Stein, after she saw one of his paintings, that he’d be better off joining his family’s textile business. Instead he committed to photography, and a new type of fast portable camera: the Leica. He eventually become one of the first photographers to join the famed photo cooperative Magnum. “Joining Magnum didn’t mean leaving a coherent artistic sphere for an alien job; and being a photo-journalist didn’t mean being a photographer,” the scholar and photo-curator Peter Galassi writes. “It meant being a student, a diplomat, a traveler, an investigator, a reporter, a historian. To Cartier-Bresson it meant engaging the whole of the world.” Today, in honor of Cartier-Bresson’s birthday, we take a look at some of the more celebratory photographs from his extraordinary career.
All photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum.
