HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON: The Man, the Image and the World: The Definitive Retrospective

Cartier-Bresson's photos of everyday scenes were apparently bothersome to an audience accustomed to the abstract work of Steiglitz and Strand. But his snapshots were a new and powerful way of documenting the world: an astrologer in 1947 Bombay; a 1967 control room at Cape Kennedy, Fla.; a 1954 "sports gala" in Moscow. He "improvised, incorporating the effects of chance and accident as he went along," writes Philippe Arbaïzar of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in an essay called "The Public Eye: Shows and Exhibitions." Saul Steinberg even made him a fake diploma authorizing Cartier-Bresson to become a photographer, as if his work needed legitimacy. With quotes from Molière, Virgil, Verlaine ("Memory, memory, what do you want of me?") punctuating the chapters, and more than 600 of Cartier-Bresson's photographs and even drawings, films and books, this is indeed a comprehensive and stunning retrospective, carefully printed and showing the huge oeuvre's variations. Complemented by essays by Peter Galassi of MoMA and Serge Toubiana of Cahiers du Cinéma, among others, the book coincides with the opening of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris, as well as the photographer's 95th birthday. (Apr.)