Henri Cartier-Bresson and the Artless Art

Henri Cartier-Bresson is perhaps the greatest photographer of the twentieth century. In a career spanning more than sixty years, he has used his camera as an impassive and neutral third eye to capture the vagaries of human behavior and to produce some of the most memorable and compelling photographs ever published.
In this impressive biographical study, Jean-Pierre Montier traces Cartier-Bresson’s artistic progression from his early training as a painter and draftsman right up to the present; he provides a detailed analysis of Cartier-Bresson’s most famous images and discusses the various philosophies that inform his work, notably Zen and surrealism. Drawing together a remarkable selection of the paintings, sketches, and photographs, this book is the first to attempt a serious evaluation not just of his photojournalism but of his oeuvre as a whole.