Henri Cartier-Bresson was born on August 22, 1908 in Chanteloup-en-Brie, France, into a bourgeois family. From an early age he showed an inclination toward the visual arts, studying painting with André Lhote and being deeply influenced by Surrealism.
In 1932, at the age of 23, he acquired his first 35mm Leica camera—a tool that was then unusual—and began walking the streets with it. The Leica changed everything: it was silent, lightweight, discreet. It allowed him to blend in with people without interrupting the life he wanted to photograph.
From that experience was born the concept that would define his career and an entire photographic movement: "l'instant décisif", the decisive moment. The idea is deceptively simple: there exists an exact, unique, unrepeatable moment in which the elements of a scene align with perfect visual and narrative coherence. One second before or after, the image would not exist. The photographer must be ready to recognize it and capture it without thinking.
Cartier-Bresson never cropped his photographs. He framed in the camera, definitively, or the image was discarded. This formal rigor was part of his photographic ethics.
In 1947 he co-founded Magnum Photos with Robert Capa, David Seymour and George Rodger, creating the world's first cooperative photographic agency, owned by the photographers themselves. Magnum remains today the most prestigious reference in photojournalism.
From the 1970s onwards, Cartier-Bresson moved away from photography to return to painting and drawing, his original love. He died on August 3, 2004 in Céreste, Provence, at the age of 95.