Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century

Henri Cartier-Bresson is one of the most influential and beloved figures in the history of photography. His early work helped define the creative potential of modern photography, and his unerring ability to capture life on the run made his work synonymous with ‘the decisive moment’ – the title of his first major book.

Released to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century is the first major publication to make full use of the extensive holdings of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris – 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 while a wide-ranging essay by Peter Galassi, Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, 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 his picture stories as they appeared in magazines – will revolutionize the study of Cartier-Bresson’s work.

The final section of the book – which runs to more than eighty pages of often newly discovered and systematically ordered reference material based on the hitherto unexplored archive of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris – is almost a publication in itself.

Peter Galassi is Chief Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art.