Born on August 22, 1908 in Chanteloup, France, Cartier-Bresson studied painting in Paris with Andre Ihote from 1927 to 1928, then attended Cambridge University where he studied painting and literature for two years. In 1931 he began his career as a photographer, and in 1934 he spent a year on an ethnographic expedition to Mexico. During the 1930s he worked as a freelance photographer in New York where he studied filmmaking with Paul Strand and also worked as an assistant director to filmmaker Jean Renoir. He was taken prisoner-of-war in Wurttemburg, Germany in 1940 but managed to escape in 1943, after which he worked for the French underground photographic units. In 1945 he began working as a freelance photographer based in Paris. In 1946 he co-founded the photo agency Magnum with Robert Capa, David Seymour and George Rodger. He traveled the world, returning to Mexico in 1960. He is best known for a term he coined that later became the title of one of his books, “the decisive moment.” His style has become the standard by which many social documentary photographers are measured. Henri Cartier-Bresson died on August 3, 2004 in France. The Southwestern & Mexican Photography Collection is fortunate to five Cartier-Bresson images; the fifth was purchased in the summer of 2004 and was among the very last he signed.
SOURCE México Through Foreign Eyes, 1850-1990 edited by Carole Naggar and Fred Ritchin (Norton, 1993) and BBC Education Centurions www.bbc.co.uk