Pierre Assouline, Henri Cartier-Bresson - A Biography

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 Post subject: Pierre Assouline, Henri Cartier-Bresson - A Biography
Unread postPosted: Fri Jul 03, 2015 3:13 pm 
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If you are like me, when you admire someone and hold them up as an example to yourself, it's not enough to be familiar with their works...you want to know about them as a person. It is that way for me in my appreciation of Henri Cartier-Bresson. As I collected his books and studied his work, I long had the impression that he was a man of mystery: a secretive individual who shunned interviewers and avoided letting others take his picture. So, when his biography by Pierre Assouline was published in English in 2005, by Thames & Hudson, I virtually flew to the nearest bookseller.

I had some doubt, prior to reading the book, that a biographer would be able to gather enough personal material to put together a close look into Cartier-Bresson's origins, formative years, and family life. Pierre Assouline was the person for the job. Editor of the French literary magazine "Lire," author of numerous published biographies (including one about Georges Prosper Remi ("Herge"), the Belgian creator of cartoon character "Tintin"), Assouline met Cartier-Bresson on a journalistic assignment in 1994. Over the next 10 years, until Cartier-Bresson's death in 2004, Assouline continued to meet with Cartier-Bresson, who apparently never assented to Assouline's continued proposals to write his biography. Assouline says he simply followed "the master's own example and disobeyed him." We should be glad he did.

The 278-page book is illustrated with fascinating black & white photographs of Cartier-Bresson at work and with his family. An extensive bibliography and detailed index round out the scholarly apparatus. Treating his subject as an artist, Assouline provides a penetrating discussion of Cartier-Bresson "searching for his medium." He also gives us illuminating views of the people who helped bring Cartier_Bresson's work to the world: the editor/publishers Teriade and Robert Delpire, Magnum co-founders Robert Capa, David "Chim' Seymour, George Rodger and William Vandivert, and printer Pierre Gassmann of the legendary laboratory Pictorial Service in Paris. For LVL members, the index lists 39 entires for "Leica" and 1 for "Leitz."

"Henri Cartier-Bresson - A Biography" is available in hardcover and paperback from Amazon.


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