Artists and Writers Examine the Genius of Henri Cartier-Bresson

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Artists and Writers Examine the Genius of Henri Cartier-Bresson

  • Richard Avedon on Henri Cartier-Bresson
    ‘[Cartier-Bresson] is the greatest photographer of the twentieth century. He is like Tolstoy was to literature. He covered all the ground in a vast way – politically, socially – and [had] the most personal and complex insight into the human personality. . . I’m absolutely in awe of him. Everybody is a Cartier-Bresson baby; they have all taken from him.”


    – Richard Avedon, Interview with Charlie Rose, 6 July 2000
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  • John Szarkowski on Henri Cartier-Bresson
    ‘. . . 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.’

    - John Szarkowski, Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1973). p. 112
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  • Annie Leibovitz on Henri Cartier-Bresson
    ‘Seeing Cartier-Bresson’s work made me want to become a photographer. I was a young painting student at the San Francisco Art Institute when I looked at The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson, which had just been published. Maybe it was something about the word “world,” as well as the pictures, that seduced me. The idea that a photographer could travel with a camera to different places, see how other people lived, make looking a mission—that that could be your life was an amazing, thrilling idea.’

    - Annie Leibovitz, in Matthieu Humery et al., Henri Cartier-Bresson: Le Grand Jeu (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France and Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, 2020), p. 73
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  • Wim Wenders on Henri Cartier-Bresson
    ‘[This] photograph shows three men, seen from behind, standing together on some sort of power distribution box, so they have a chance to look across the still makeshift and newly erected Berlin wall. This is taking place in the mid-1960s, and I remember that very corner of Bernauer Straße really well. I took similar photos of people staring over to East Berlin which more and more became the other side of the moon for us, so close and yet so far away! . . . Cartier-Bresson shows “viewers” and the act of seeing, but also what they are looking at. By placing himself (and us along with him) behind those viewers whom we only see from the back, we are made to identify with their longing, their shock, their consternation. Our act of seeing becomes one with theirs.’

    - Wim Wenders, in Matthieu Humery et al., Henri Cartier-Bresson: Le Grand Jeu (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France and Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, 2020), pp. 153-4
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  • Walker Evans on Henri Cartier-Bresson
    ‘What Cartier-Bresson has is a more or less dependable ability to snap a picture just when a child takes off into an ecstatic state of being as he skips beside a wall that is covered with an unearthly design of some lunarlike patina.’

    - Walker Evans’ review of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 1952 book The Decisive Moment, as quoted in Cartier-Bresson’s obituary, The New York Times, 4 August 2004
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  • Arthur Miller on Henri Cartier-Bresson
    ‘There was plenty of glitz in America in the 60s and 70s, yes and in the 40s, the era of these pictures, but clearly Cartier-Bresson was trying to get behind it to the substance of American society. And since his is fundamentally a tragic vision, he reacted most feelingly to what in America he saw as related to its decay, its pain. The very horizon is often oppressive, jagged with junked cars, the detritus of the consumer culture, which after all is a culture of planned waste, engineered obsolescence.’

    - Arthur Miller, foreword to Henri Cartier-Bresson: America in Passing (Boston, 1998)
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  • Berenice Abbott on Henri Cartier-Bresson
    On seeing Cartier-Bresson’s work in a 1935 exhibition at the Julian Levy Gallery in New York, Abbott recalled: ‘He was a genius, I had a small talent.’

    - Abbott’s conversation with Agnès Sire, New York, 2004, as quoted in Documentary and Anti-Graphic Photographs by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans (Paris: Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, 2004), p. 33
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