Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century

This book, published to accompany the major retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, is the first significant volume to draw fully on the extensive holdings of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris. Many of the photographs are images made famous by The Decisive Moment and subsequent publications, but many others have rarely - if ever - been published before, and will be unfamiliar to even the most dedicated follower of Cartier-Bresson. Peter Galassi's essay explores the varied and often competing artistic, intellectual, social and professional frames of reference that shaped Cartier-Bresson, offering a fresh understanding of the panoramic scope of the photographer's work, from his Surrealist innovations of the early 1930s to his photojournalism and late work.

In addition to Peter Galassi's introductory text, in which he draws on twenty years of work and friendship with the photographer, the final sections of the book - which runs to more than eighty pages of often newly discovered and systematically ordered reference material based on the hitherto unexplored archive of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris - is almost a publication in itself. Photo historians and anyone who takes an intelligent interest in photography at last have a true basis for the appreciation of the astonishing breadth and depth of the spectacular career of photography's great master.