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Henri Cartier-BressonFrench, 1908-2004
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Henri Cartier-Bresson has described himself as a photojournalist, a label doubtless no more misleading than any other available.
To put the identification in a fuller perspective, it might be added that he is probably the only photojournalist to have studied painting with Andre Lhote, the chief academician of Cubism, and also that relatively few of his pictures are concerned with journalistic events in the traditional sense.
It is also true that many of his finest pictures have been made not on assignment, but out of an amateur's fascination with the world about him; but this is of course true of most important photographers.
A photographer's best work is, alas, generally done for himself.
Without minimizing the value of his work as reportage, it must be said that Cartier-Bresson's photographs are revered by other photographers because they are beautiful.
They possess grace, balance, surprise, economy, tension, and visual wit: the qualities of a good gymnast or dancer. Or the qualities of a good picture.
This is not to suggest that Cartier-Bresson's pictures are abstractions.
They spring from a response to specific life; their formal eloquence is a tribute to their human meaning.
If they were less they would be, to Cartier-Bresson, solutions without problems.
The photograph opposite concerns gesture, line, shape, scale, the flatness of the picture plane, and the difference between art and life.
To say that the picture concerns these things does not, of course, mean that it explains them.
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Atget Library
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Henri Cartier-Bresson
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