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51 Henri Cartier-Bresson was one of the co-founders of Magnum Photos in 1947 and, in addition, is arguably the most influential photographer of the twentieth century. Champion of the 'decisive moment', he brought a new aesthetic and practice to photography, initiated modern photojournalism, and shaped a generation of photographers. Cartier-Bresson was born on 22 August 1908, the eldest of five children of a wealthy textile manufacturer and his wife, the scion of a Normandy landowning family. Brought up in a bourgeois suburb of Paris, he was educated at the École Fénelon, and then at the Lhote Academy, a studio run by the Cubist painter, André Lhote. An underlying dissatisfaction with painting, and a year at Cambridge University from 1928-29, disrupted Cartier-Bresson's development as a painter, and he found himself increasingly drawn to the more immediate (and fashionable) medium of photography. Independently wealthy, living off an allowance from his father, Cartier- Bresson was free to experiment and, after buying a Leica 35mm camera in 1932, he began travelling extensively. Between 1932 and 1935 he visited Italy, Spain, Morocco, and Mexico, developing his love, and genius, for the medium. During the Second World War, Cartier-Bresson was captured by the Nazis, escaped and joined the French Resistance. He was honoured with an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1947. In the same year, he joined forces with fellow photographers Robert Capa, George Rodger and David Seymour to found a new photographic agency, Magnum Photos, to be based in Paris and New York. Cartier-Bresson's post-war career was dominated by his work for Magnum, which in turn was often commissioned by Life magazine. His remit for the agency was to cover India and China, but in fact he travelled widely for the next twenty years, also taking assignments in the USA, France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia and many other locations. Swiftly becoming one of the world's most sought-after photojournalists, Cartier-Bresson covered many of the great events of the twentieth century. He also published a series of highly influential books beginning with the seminal Images à La Sauvette (1952), followed by The Europeans (1955) and then over thirty more, the last being Landscape Townscape (2001). In 1968 he retired from photography, returning to his first love, drawing, for the remainder of his life. Cartier-Bresson died at his home in Provence on 3 August 2004, a few weeks short of his 96th birthday. Henri Cartier-Bresson 1908-2004

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