Another Henri Cartier_Bresson link in what seems to be an ongoing Henri Cartier-Bresson festival. Previous entries are here and here.

Cartier-Bresson's Instinct for Decisive Moments

But now, just months short of his 95th birthday, the master of the "decisive moment," as he once described his art, is himself the reluctant object of celebration. Coinciding with a major retrospective of his work at the French National Library here, Mr. Cartier-Bresson, his wife, the photographer Martine Franck, and their daughter, Mélanie Cartier-Bresson, have created the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, the first private foundation dedicated to photography in France.
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Yet it is at the foundation, housed in a renovated 19th-century building at 2 Impasse Lebouis in the Montparnasse district of Paris, that Mr. Cartier-Bresson has presented a different side to his art — the photographers whom he most admires and who have influenced him. For the foundation's opening show, "Henri Cartier-Bresson's Choice," he has picked 93 images by 85 fellow photographers.

Along with images by Robert Capa, George Rodger and David Seymour, with whom Mr. Cartier-Bresson founded the Magnum photo agency in 1947, there are works by leading 20th-century photographers, from Brassaï to Sebastião Salgado. Also on display is Martin Munkacsi's "Black Boys on the Shore of Lake Tanganyika," the 1931 photograph that first inspired Mr. Cartier-Bresson to become a photographer.
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At Cartier-Bresson Foundation: Munkacsi's 1931 image of boys at Lake Tanganyika inspired Henri Cartier-Bresson to become a photographer.

"Shooting a picture is recognizing an event," he later explained, "and at the very instant and within a fraction of a second rigorously organizing the forms you see to express and give meaning to that event. It is a matter of putting your brain, your eye and your heart in the same line of sight. It is a way of life."

A photograph by Mr. Cartier-Bresson taken in Beijing in December 1948, during the final days of the Kuomintang.

  thanks to DANGEROUSMETA!