Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson was born at Chanteloup-en-Brie in 1908 into a family of textile manufacturers, studied painting under Andre Lhote, and took up the Leica in 1932. Taken prisoner in 1940, he escaped on his third attempt in 1943. In 1947 he co-founded the Magnum agency with Robert Capa, George Rodger and David Seymour, and spent the next quarter-century on assignment — the funeral of Gandhi, the last days of the Kuomintang in China, the Soviet Union after Stalin. His 1952 book Images a la Sauvette, published in English as The Decisive Moment with a cover by Matisse, gave his approach its name. He turned back to drawing in the 1970s and died in 2004.

He did not print his own negatives, so the questions are when a print was made and for what purpose. Prints made at the time for magazines, agencies and exhibitions, often with agency or photographer's stamps on the verso, are the scarce category. Far more common are the later exhibition prints of the 1970s to the 1990s, many of them signed in ink, and a later print and a vintage print from the same negative are different objects. He insisted on printing the full negative uncropped, often with a thin black border, and a cropped print raises questions. The Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, which he set up with Martine Franck and which opened in 2003, holds the archive.