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The Decisive Moment (Images à la Sauvette in French) is one of the greatest photography books ever published. It brings together photographic material from the first twenty years of Henri Cartier-Bresson's career.
Images à la Sauvette was published in 1952 by Verve, with an original cover by Matisse. It was the result of a collaboration between the photographer, the famous art critic and publisher Tériade, and the painter, at the peak of his career. The American version, published the same year by Simon and Schuster, was the first to introduce the now-famous expression decisive moment.
The book, which reveals the intrinsic duality of Henri Cartier-Bresson's work, the combination of intimate interpretation with documentary observation, received tremendous critical acclaim within the art world and is considered a bible for photographers, in the words of photographer Robert Capa. It remains an essential reference for photographers to this day.
The original book, now out of print, has become a collector's item. The Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson sought to make this classic photography book accessible again, in a smaller and practical format, at an affordable price. The latest print features the same material as the original 1952 edition, and is accompanied by a comprehensive study of the book's making, its enduring popularity, and the considerations behind its title, written by Clément Chéroux, director of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Offers an entirely new understanding of the photographer's extraordinary career and its overlapping contexts of journalism and art
Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) is one of the most influential and beloved figures in the history of photography. His inventive work of the early 1930s helped define the creative potential of modern photography. Following World War II, he helped found the Magnum photo agency, which enabled photojournalists to reach a broad audience through magazines such as Life while retaining control over their work. Cartier-Bresson would go on to produce major bodies of photographic reportage, capturing such events as China during the revolution, the Soviet Union after Stalin's death, the United States in the postwar boom and Europe as its older cultures confronted modern realities. Published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, this is the first major publication to make full use of the extensive holdings of the Fondation Cartier-Bresson--including thousands of prints and a vast resource of documents relating to the photographer's life and work. The heart of the book surveys Cartier-Bresson's career through 300 photographs divided into 12 chapters. While many of his most famous pictures are included, a great number of images will be unfamiliar even to specialists. A wide-ranging essay by Peter Galassi, Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum, offers an entirely new understanding of Cartier-Bresson's extraordinary career and its overlapping contexts of journalism and art. The extensive supporting material--featuring detailed chronologies of the photographer's professional travels and of spreads of his picture stories as they appeared in magazines--will revolutionize the study of Cartier-Bresson's work.
Cartier-Bresson by Cartier-Bresson: the photographer's master set survey of his career, presented for the first time alongside selections by Annie Leibovitz, Wim Wenders and others
In the early 1970s, at the request of his friends and collectors John and Dominique Menil, Henri Cartier-Bresson went through the thousands of prints in his archives with the idea of choosing the most important and significant works of his career. He picked 385 photographs, which were printed in a format of 12 x 16 inches at his most trusted laboratory in Paris between 1972 and 1973, in five copies each. This so-called Master Set has never before been published in its entirety.
Now, photographer Annie Leibovitz, film director Wim Wenders, writer Javier Cercas, chief curator of the Department of Prints and Photographs at the Biblioth que Nationale de France Sylvie Aubenas and collector Fran ois Pinault have been invited to each choose roughly 50 pictures from this Master Set. Through their selection, each of them shares a personal vision of the work of this great artist. Henri Cartier-Bresson: Le Grand Jeu is divided into two parts: the first presents the personal choice of each of the curators, accompanied by a text written for the occasion; the second presents the whole of the Master Set as it was assembled by Cartier-Bresson. This unprecedented volume thus constitutes the most personal, and indeed the most authoritative, panorama of his oeuvre yet published. Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) was born in Chantelou-en-Brie, France. He initially studied painting and began photographing in the 1930s. Cartier-Bresson cofounded Magnum in 1947. In the late 1960s he returned to his original passion, drawing. In 2003 Cartier-Bresson established the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, one year before his death.
