Salamanca, Spain 1963

Born in 1908 to a wealthy family who made their money manufacturing sewing thread, Henri Cartier-Bresson wanted to avoid going into the family business and desired to become a painter–he ended up becoming a photographer who would change modern photography instead.

In the 1920s, photography was a century old but was not thought of as an art form. There were, however, a group of young Turkish artists who experimented with the medium of photography as art. In 1888 Eastman invented the first Kodak film camera. It was not considered a tool for serious photography which required a tripod and a large format camera. But by the 1920s small cameras became of interest to young artists because it freed one from the tripod and art became more spontaneous. By the early 1930s Cartier-Bresson made lots of pictures that became the cornerstone of modern photography.

Houston, TX 1957

The maps at the entrance to the exhibition trace the routes that Cartier-Bresson traveled throughout his lifetime. These travels allowed him to photograph and expose people to cultures around the globe including: Europe, China, India, Indonesia, America, etc. His oeuvre includes candid shots of people from the Old World who used practices from before the Industrial Revolution that were slowly disappearing to shots of the Modern World–portraits, landscapes, poor, wealthy–he captured moments of the everyday from all walks of life.

He was a prisoner of war in World War II in a forced work camp and his work changed as a result of that experience. Photojournalism became the vehicle through which he captured the climate of the world. In his early career in the 1930s he turned ordinary moments into the magical. This shifted to capturing the interaction among people demonstrating trends of the particular culture he was photographing.

Sayan, Bali, Indonesia, 1949

The exhibition does a nice job of chronologically laying out Cartier-Bresson’s works throughout his career. It is amazing to me that he could have covered so much ground and photographed such varied subject matter with almost every single work being beautiful and remarkable in its own way. Truly a master of photography, you should definitely make this a show to see in NYC before it closes on June 28th.