Peter Galassi

Henri Cartier-Bresson is one of the most influential and beloved figures in the history of photography. His early work helped define the creative potential of modern photography, and his unerring ability to capture life on the run made his work synonymous with ‘the decisive moment’ – the title of his first major book. Released to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century is the first major publication to make full use of the extensive holdings of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris – including thousands of prints and a vast resource of documents relating to the photographer’s life and work. The heart of the book surveys Cartier-Bresson’s career through 300 photographs while a wide-ranging essay by Peter Galassi, Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, offers an entirely new understanding of Cartier-Bresson’s extraordinary career and its overlapping contexts of journalism and art. The extensive supporting material – featuring detailed chronologies of the photographer’s professional travels and his picture stories as they appeared in magazines – will revolutionize the study of Cartier-Bresson’s work. The final section 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.

Because of the importance of Robert Frank's "The Americans"; because he turned to filmmaking in 1959, the same year the book appeared in the United States; and because he made very different kinds of pictures when he returned to still photography in the 1970s, most of Frank's American work of the 1950s is poorly known. This book, based on the important Frank collection at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, is the first to focus on that work. Its careful sequence of 131 plates integrates 22 photographs from "The Americans" with more than 100 unknown or unfamiliar images to chart the major themes and pictorial strategies of Frank's work in the United States in the 1950s. Peter Galassi's text presents a thorough reconsideration of Frank's first photographic career and examines in detail how he used the full range of photography's vital 35mm vocabulary to reclaim the medium's artistic tradition from the hegemony of the magazines.

Brassai (1899-1984) was a key member of a group of European and North American photographers who, over the course of the 20th century, managed to redefine the identity and enrich the potential of photography as an artistic medium. The main theme of his work was Paris, the subject matter for some of his most significant and renowned images. He captured vibrant images of the daily life of the city, especially the vitality of its night-time atmosphere, in a vivid expression of the powerful artistic dimension of his perspective. The evocative capacity of his images achieved unquestionable recognition that spread from artistic photography circles to the tourist industry and the commercial photography circuit.