With 200 Illustrations.

Explores the key role Paris played in Cartier-Bresson's artistic career, and the way he looked at the city he lived in – and loved.

An inveterate traveller, Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) captured the world with his camera, justly earning himself the title of ‘the eye of the century’. Between trips overseas, he regularly photographed Paris, although he rarely spoke about the city that he had made his home, where he had spent his formative years, made friends, and built a hard-won reputation.

Produced in collaboration with the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson and designed to accompany a major exhibition at the Musée Carnavalet, this book showcases more than sixty years of images of Paris. It invites you to follow in the footsteps of a master photographer as he wanders the banks of the Seine and explores the more rarely seen edges of a city in a state of perpetual change.

Contents List

1. 1929-1934: The Beginnings • 2. 1935-1939: The Time of Work Engagement • 1944: The Liberation of Paris • 1944-1994: 20th-Century People • 1951-1966: A Surveyor of life • May 1968 • 1968-1985: After Magnum • 1974-1994: A Return to Drawing

About the Author

Anne de Mondenard is a photography historian and curator at the Musée Carnavalet. Agnès Sire has been the director of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris since its creation in 2003. Peter Galassi is a scholar and curator whose principal fields are photography and 19th-century French art. He was Chief Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art from 1991 to 2011.