Henri Cartier-Bresson, the motion picture

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Impassioned Eye. I don't suppose it'll come to the theaters in Iowa City, but I'll be looking forward to it on DVD. The NYT says,

Even when viewed secondhand in a movie, these photographs are something to see. Their formal elegance is balanced by an intense, pulsing humanity. In all his photographs, Cartier-Bresson says, "geometry is the foundation."

I went to an exhibition of his photography in July '04 which has moved to Amsterdam.

Cartier-Bresson was known as the photographer of the ‘decisive moment’. This exhibition provides a retrospective of his work and his life as a photographer, as well as examining what was in his mind at the ‘decisive moment’ and what influenced him.

There are four of his pictures at the bottom of that page. This site has fifteen, but they really butcher one of my favorites and cut off approximately the right one-third of the picture. Here is a larger version of the original (which is at the top of this post and also hanging at my house. Come on over.). Comparing the two gives a person an appreciation of what Bresson could have meant by 'geometry is the foundation.' It wasn't just bullshit. The one that is cut off is inferior for a number of reasons, but at least one is because it fails to capture the length of the wall as the uncut version does. The street sign in the true version balances with the three men and highlights the line of the wall in a way that doesn't happen when the wall just sort of spills out of the picture in the cut version. Beyond this geography, the sign demonstrates the unnatural interruption of life that was the wall.

He was also famous for his portraits and this one of Truman Capote I think is great.