Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century
High Museum of Art
1280 Peachtree Street, NE
February 16–May 15, 2011
The Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
July 24–October 3, 2010
MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street
April 11–June 21, 2010
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
151 Third Street
March 17, 2010–January 30, 2011
Curated by Peter Galassi
Long canonized through his street photographs’ articulation of the “decisive moment,” pioneering photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson is now the subject of a three-hundred-print retrospective. Although he documented many of the social shifts around the world between the 1930s and the ’70s, it is primarily his portrait of the quotidian life of postwar Europe, imbued with charm and sentiment, that has seemingly endured. The exhibition’s inclusion of his reportage from China, India, and elsewhere promises to expand our understanding of his oeuvre, but it is just one of the opportunities the show offers to renew HCB’s legacy in a present whose most innovative photography is premeditated and straddles fact and fiction.