Aperture is pleased to present the elegantly updated and refreshed Henri Cartier-Bresson edition of the Aperture Masters of Photography Series. With an introduction by notable curator Clement Cheroux, this edition includes new, image-by-image commentary and a chronology of this influential and iconic artists life. Initially presented as the History of Photography Series in 1976, the first volume of the Masters of Photography Series featured Cartier-Bresson and was edited by legendary French publisher Robert Delpire, who cofounded the series with Apertures own Michael Hoffman. In this redesigned and expanded version of the classic Aperture book, we have kept the majority of the selection of images from the original series which Cartier-Bresson himself created with Delpire, encapsulating the spontaneity and intuition for which this legendary photographer is so celebrated.

When 24-year old Henri Cartier-Bresson acquired a Leica camera in 1932, his casual interest in photography turned into passion. This volume explores the photographer’s early work documenting the poor and disenfranchised in Italy, Spain, Eastern Europe, and Mexico. Marked by tangible empathy and solidarity with the models, it is an original body of work to be rediscovered.

Henri Cartier-Bresson was taken prisoner by the Germans in 1940. After two unsuccessful attempts, he managed to escape in 1943. During this time, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, assuming that the photographer had died in the war, started preparing what they thought was a posthumous exhibition of his work. When he reappeared, Cartier-Bresson was delighted to learn of the exhibition, and decided to review his entire work and curate it himself. In 1946 he travelled to New York with about 300 prints in his suitcase, bought a scrapbook, glued each one in, and brought that album to MoMA’s curators. His first exhibition, a celebration of his survival, opened on 4 February 1947. In the 1990s, Cartier-Bresson once again returned to this scrapbook. Following his death in 2004, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, the present owner of the prints, finished restoring them, making it possible to bring a large body of extraordinary, hitherto unpublished work to the public, images that have finally become a memorial collection after all.

The 50 most famous iconic photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, doyen of picture journalism.

Some 15 years ago Cartier-Bresson decided to lay down the Leica and return to his first love painting and drawing to which he brings the same magic that infused his famous photographs. The foreword by John Russell (chief art critic, The New York Times) and introduction by Jean Clair.