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Henri, Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004), French photographer, known for his reportage work was born in Chanteloup and educated at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris. Originally interested in painting, he took up photography in 1930. Starting in 1931, Cartier-Bresson traveled widely; the many photographs he took on his trips have been published in newspapers, magazines, and books, and his work has been exhibited frequently.

Cartier-Bresson excelled in composition without cropping his negatives, and he had a unique ability to capture the fleeting moment in which the subject's significance is revealed in form, content, and expression. He termed this the "decisive moment."

Cartier-Bresson wanted to "paint and to change the world," which, he said, "counted for more than everything in my life." But the young man's artistic efforts were not all that successful. Although he possessed a camera, it was not until after he returned from a year in West Africa in 1931, where he had worked as a game hunter, that he began to realize photography's artistic potential.

No doubt the game-hunting had sharpened his reflexes, but his development as a serious photographer occurred against the background of enormous social and political upheavals: the 1930s depression, the rise of fascism, and most importantly, the widespread belief amongst millions of ordinary people that human progress could only be developed in struggle against the old cultural values and political institutions.

At the same time, technical advances, in particular the development of the lightweight Leica camera and faster film, freed Cartier-Bresson and other photographers from the restrictions of large format tripod-bound cameras and encouraged improvisation. While André Kertész, Robert Capa and others had used the new cameras to great effect, Cartier-Bresson introduced a unique artistic sensibility.

Over the next few years, Cartier-Bresson became a trailblazer, photographing the homeless and the poor in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Poland and Spain. As he later remarked: "I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to trap life--to preserve life in the act of living. Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of a single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling before my eyes."

Cartier-Bresson's early work, the most powerful in his long career, is extraordinary and remains undiminished by the passage of time. His Spanish photographs of children in ruined buildings, poverty-stricken peasants and demonstrating workers are well known around the world.   As well, his shots of Republican fighters and shots from Eastern Europe, particularly those from the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, are outstanding. Possessed by a brilliant sense of timing and often wry humor, his images are provocative and unexpected; always strikingly beautiful and deeply humane.

He rejected staged photographs, artificial lighting, including flashes, or anything that might place a barrier between him and his subject. A master of his camera, Cartier-Bresson also refused to allow any of his images to be cropped--the whole shot had to be presented in totality or not at all.

As one of his many helpful comments declared: "Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing. Success depends on the extent of one's general culture, one's set of values, one's clarity of mind, one's vivacity. The thing to be feared most is the artificially contrived, the contrary to life."

It is perhaps wrong to highlight any single image from this period, but for those unfamiliar with Cartier-Bresson's photography, "Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris" (1932) and Madrid" (1933) are important examples.

"Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris" captures a man, mid-flight, vainly attempting to jump over a gigantic puddle. His shadow and other items in the puddle, including a ladder, form an arresting geometric pattern. The frozen leap is set against the background of an iron railroad fence and a poster of a dancer.

"Madrid" (1933) is a shot of 11 children playing in a small square. The children, who are in a diverse range of positions and emotional expressions, are framed against a wall peppered with different-sized windows. And, mid-shot, a pot-bellied middle-aged man walks across the square.

During World War II (1939-1945) Cartier-Bresson spent 35 months in German prison camps. After three attempts, he escaped and made his way to Paris. There he joined a photographic unit of the Resistance in France that recorded the German occupation and retreat. In 1945 he directed the documentary film Le retour (The Return) for the United States Office of War Information.

In 1947 Cartier-Bresson had a one-person exhibition of his photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The same year he was a founder of Magnum Photos, the first cooperative photo agency, which provided periodicals with photographs taken by top photographers working worldwide. Under the agency's aegis, Cartier-Bresson began to both travel and focus more on reportage photography. In 1955 he was invited to become the first photographer to exhibit at the Louvre in Paris. Among the published collections of his photographs are The Decisive Moment (1952), The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson (1968), and Henri Cartier-Bresson (1980).

In 1952, along with the growing success of his photojournalism career, Cartier-Bresson published The Decisive Moment (first published in French as Images à la sauvette), a collection of photographs and a short but seminal essay on his artistic vision.

"Photography," he explained, was an "instantaneous operation, both sensory and intellectual--an expression of the world in visual terms, and also a perpetual quest and interrogation. It is at one and the same time the recognition of a fact in a fraction of a second and the rigorous arrangement of the forms visually perceived which give to that fact expression and significance.... The chief requirement is to be fully involved in this reality which we delineate in the viewfinder."

These insightful remarks not only summarized the intellectual mechanics of modern photography but also demonstrated that photography had arrived as an instrument of aesthetic expression. Cartier-Bresson's conceptions became a credo for countless photographers around the world.