French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson died on this day, August 3rd, in 2004. He was 95 years old. One of the great post-war photographers, Cartier-Bresson had been a prisoner of the Nazis from 1940 to 1943.
His black and white photographs set the standard for modern photojournalism, and he covered the liberation of Paris in 1945, the Chinese revolution in 1949, human beings all over the world and famous artists, writers and political leaders, including Henri Matisse, Mohandas Gandhi and Samuel Beckett.
Here’s Cartier-Bresson’s portrait of young Truman Capote (1947):
And here’s a shot by Cartier-Bresson from Alicane, Spain (1932):
