‘Relentlessly brilliant … as I turn the pages of this book I experience a sort of – Black & White Photography quiet awe’ – Black & White Photography – Metro ‘Totally arresting and utterly beautiful’– Metro ‘Another release of spellbinding images from the master’s archive … one gets – Amateur Photographer from his images a real sense of curiosity about the human spirit’– Amateur Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson was perhaps the finest and most influential imagemaker of the 20th century, and his portraits are among his best-known work. Over a fifty-year period, he photographed some of the most eminent personalities of the era, as well as ordinary people, chosen as subjects because of their striking and unusual features. In 2003, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, which was created to provide a permanent home for his collected works, opened in Paris. This book is published to coincide with the first exhibition at the Fondation that is drawn entirely from those archives, and it features both well-known images and previously unpublished portraits. Each photograph has been chosen because it perfectly embodies Cartier-Bresson’s description of what he was attempting to communicate in his work: ‘Above all I look for an inner silence. I seek to translate the personality and not an expression.’ The portraits reproduced here – discreet, without artifice – confirm once more the singular gift of Cartier-Bresson, who instinctively knew in which revealing fraction of a second to click the shutter. Reviews Published to coincide with the first exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, this handsome collection spanning 70 years of image-making gathers 97 portraits by one of the defining photographers of the 20th century. Stripping away artifice from his subject, Cartier-Bresson could capture a personality with a click of his legendary Leica. The book collects portraits of world leaders, artists, celebrities and ordinary citizens, including many famous images-e.g., Sartre and Pouillon standing on Pont Des Arts-and a few iconic ones, like a young Truman Capote on a New Orleans bench engulfed by large leaves. Several pictures, including arresting images of Carson McCullers, Joan Mir?, Susan Sontag and Francis Bacon, are previously unpublished. Some of the images confirm the persona of the subject: Carl Jung puffing on his pipe and William Faulkner rolling up his shirt sleeves as dogs nip at his heels. Others shed light on a familiar figure: Martin Luther King lost in thought at his cluttered desk, pen in one hand and his forehead resting in the other. These masterful photos blend the spontaneity of a great snapshot with the highly organized composition of a classical painting. 97 tritone reproductions. (May) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information. Henry Cartier-Bresson, who helped define the field of artistic photo reportage in the 20th century, was a prime inspiration to successive generations of artists well before his death in 2004. This book by Sire (director, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris) and Nancy (philosophy, Universit? Marc Bloch, Strasbourg) presents 97 of the master's portraits, which appeared in a recent exhibition in Paris and span seven decades of his career. The portraits depict the famous and the less well known and capture Cartier-Bresson's "perfect moment" in both the corporeal and psychic senses, expanding on the undeniable prescience of this photographer's lens and compelling the viewer's attention. As with his other work, there is a formal, subtle, and uncanny logic to these black-and-white compositions, some of them previously unpublished. Alexander Calder, the patriarch of kinetic sculpture, is placed in a frame dominated by structural beams suspended above his doglike grin. A wizened Ezra Pound looks empty-souled, his freakish halo of white hair spotlighted by raking sunlight at St. Elizabeth's Hospital. And the boyish Truman Capote withdraws to an even smaller size amid broadleaf hothouse plants. This fine update to Cartier-Bresson's long out-of-print Photoportraits (1985) is highly recommended for all libraries.-Douglas F. Smith, Oakland P.L., CA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.