Cape Cod Woman on the Fourth of July, Documentary Portrait Photography
View Similar Items
Henri Cartier-BressonCape Cod Woman on the Fourth of July, Documentary Portrait Photography 1947
1947
About the Item
- Creator:Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908 - 2004, French)
- Creation Year:1947
- Dimensions:Height: 13.5 in (34.29 cm)Width: 9 in (22.86 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:New york, NY
- Reference Number:Seller: 99Prints1stDibs: LU74633919632
Henri Cartier-Bresson
The late photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson spent his long and varied career traveling the world and capturing images of everyone from children to cultural icons.
Beautiful but unsentimental street photography of children was one of the surprises offered by the sweeping survey “The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson,” at Peter Fetterman Gallery, in Santa Monica, California, in 2021. Some of the images are iconic, like Cartier-Bresson’s historic 1950s photographs for Life magazine of a newly Communist China and his portraits of cultural lions like Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti and Samuel Beckett. But nearly half the images, Fetterman said, were printed specifically at the gallery’s request and had not been widely exhibited or published.
One of the most striking discoveries was a 1954 image of five Russian girls standing in second position at a wrought-iron-and-wood ballet barre. The coolly elegant blond girl closest to the camera looks no more than 10 or 12 years old, but her calf muscles are as defined as those of an adult track star. “Rue Mouffetard, Paris,” from 1954, captures a boy grinning from ear to ear as he walks along a city street toward the lens — and presumably toward home — carrying with chin jutted out and visible pride a wine bottle under each arm. This picture, in which all elements conspire to highlight the boy’s swagger (notice the girls noticing the boy), is an illustration of capturing “the decisive moment,” which Cartier-Bresson famously defined and which modernists took as the ultimate goal of photography, although others later were more skeptical.
Born in 1908 in Chanteloup-en-Brie, France, the oldest of five children, Cartier-Bresson studied art and literature in school, refusing to join his father’s prosperous textile business. In 1931, he traveled to Africa to hunt wild game and found that he preferred a different kind of shoot: taking pictures with a small box camera.
On his return to France, Cartier-Bresson bought a Leica with a 50mm lens — the camera he called the “extension of my eye” and used for decades. He soon began working as a photojournalist, traveling the globe to capture everyday moments as well as some of the defining political events of the 20th century, from Gandhi’s funeral in 1948 and the fall of the Kuomintang in China in 1949 to the student uprising in Paris in 1968.
Cartier-Bresson was himself caught up in conflict. A French army officer during World War II, he was detained as a prisoner of war by the Nazis, prompting rumors he’d been killed. His photography was taken seriously enough at this time that the Museum of Modern Art in New York began preparing what it believed would be a posthumous retrospective of his work. The show took place in 1947, when the photographer was abundantly alive and well, and busy cofounding the great photo agency Magnum. MoMA has been a guardian and champion of his work ever since.
Find original Henri Cartier-Bresson black-and-white photography on 1stDibs.
- Helen Frankenthaler, Painter in the Studio, Photograph of Woman Artist 1950sBy Burt GlinnLocated in New york, NYA portrait of Helen Frankenthaler (1925-2011) in her studio in New York. Glinn captures the celebrated artist, Frankenthaler, in the process of making art - surrounded by paint, mate...Category
1950s Contemporary Black and White Photography
MaterialsPhotographic Film, Photographic Paper, Silver Gelatin
- Beauty Contest, Harlem, Black and White Photography of African American FashionBy Leonard FreedLocated in New york, NYBeauty Contest, Harlem, 1963 by Leonard Freed is a 16" x 20" gelatin silver print, signed verso (on back) by the Freed estate. The image appears in Amer...Category
1960s Contemporary Black and White Photography
MaterialsPhotographic Paper, Photographic Film, Silver Gelatin
- World Series Win, New York City, Black and White Baseball Photography 1950sBy Leonard FreedLocated in New york, NYWorld Series Win, New York City, 1954 by Leonard Freed, is a 14" x 11" gelatin silver later ("lifetime") print, signed on verso (back of print) by the ...Category
1950s Contemporary Black and White Photography
MaterialsPhotographic Paper, Photographic Film, Silver Gelatin
$2,240 Sale Price25% Off - Mr. Harlem, Photograph of African American Life New York City 1960sBy Leonard FreedLocated in New york, NYThe image capturing African-American life in Harlem in the 1960s, Mr. Harlem, 1963 by Leonard Freed, is a 14” x 11” black-and-white photograph from the photographer's book Black in W...Category
1960s Contemporary Black and White Photography
MaterialsPhotographic Paper, Photographic Film, Silver Gelatin
$1,920 Sale Price20% Off - Woman Protestor, March on Washington, African-American Civil Rights PhotographyBy Leonard FreedLocated in New york, NYWoman Protestor, March on Washington, 1963 by Leonard Freed, is a 14" x 11" gelatin silver photograph, signed and stamped on verso (back of photo) by the estate, Brigitte Freed (wife of the photographer). The photo is in Leonard Freed's book “This Is the Day: The March on Washington'' (p. 50). Leonard Freed enjoyed documentary storytelling and as a "concerned photographer" his work demonstrated humanitarian concerns. The photographer travelled to New York, Washington, D.C., and throughout the South, capturing the daily life of African-Americans. Documenting the 1960s Civil Rights Movement from the East Coast to the Deep South, Freed’s photo essay culminated in the book Black in White America, which contributed to Freed's becoming one of the well-known documentary photographers of 20th Century America. After Freed’s death in 2006 his widow, Brigitte Freed was inspired to compile a book on the March on Washington from her late husband’s archive when she heard then-Senator former President Barack Obama remark to an audience of civil rights activists, “I stand here because you walked.” The March on Washington series is a powerful visual testimony, capturing protests that culminated in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream'' speech, delivered at the base of the Lincoln Memorial. Provenance: Freed archive. *** Artist’s Bio: Leonard Freed (1929-2006) was an American photographer from Brooklyn, New York. His "Black in White America" series made him known as a documentarian, a social documentary photographer. Freed worked as a freelance photographer from 1961 onwards and as a Magnum photographer Freed traveled widely abroad and, in the US, photographing African Americans (1964-65), events in Israel (1967-68, 1973), and the New York City police department (1972-79). Freed's coverage of the American civil rights...Category
1960s Contemporary Black and White Photography
MaterialsPhotographic Paper, Photographic Film, Silver Gelatin
- Harlem, Photograph of African American Everyday Life in New York City 1950sBy Leonard FreedLocated in New york, NYHarlem, 1954 by Leonard Freed, is a 14” x 11” photograph from the photographer's Black in White America book (p. 91). The gelatin silver print from the estate is stamped verso (back ...Category
1950s Contemporary Black and White Photography
MaterialsPhotographic Paper, Photographic Film, Silver Gelatin
- Untitled PortraitBy Seydou KeïtaLocated in New York, NYListing includes framing with UV Plexi ($900 value), free shipping, and a 14-day return policy. Seydou Keïta Untitled Portrait, 1952 - 1955 (02158) 23...Category
1950s Black and White Photography
MaterialsPhotographic Paper, Photographic Film, Silver Gelatin
- Untitled PortraitBy Seydou KeïtaLocated in New York, NYListing includes framing with UV Plexi ($900 value), free shipping, and a 14-day return policy. Seydou Keïta Untitled Portrait, 1952 - 1955 (00089-MA.K...Category
1950s Black and White Photography
MaterialsPhotographic Paper, Photographic Film, Silver Gelatin
- Diana Vreeland, Silver Gelatin PrintBy Jack RobinsonLocated in Memphis, TNDiana Vreeland photographed by Jack Robinson in her office at Conde Nast, March 28, 1968. Vreeland had asked that Jack take her portrait for an article that would appear in the the ...Category
1960s Black and White Photography
MaterialsPhotographic Film, Photographic Paper, Silver Gelatin
- Cybill Shepherd, Silver Gelatin PrintBy Jack RobinsonLocated in Memphis, TNCybill Shepherd was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and after winning a beauty pageant, became an enormously successful model. Shepherd had an All-America...Category
1970s Black and White Photography
MaterialsPhotographic Film, Photographic Paper, Silver Gelatin
- Hats on the Beach, Silver Gelatin PrintBy Jack RobinsonLocated in Memphis, TN"Hats on the Beach." This fashion photograph features two models playing checkers on the beach in coordinating swimsuits and monochrome hats. Robinson was a fr...Category
1950s Black and White Photography
MaterialsPhotographic Film, Photographic Paper, Silver Gelatin
- Hubert de Givenchy, Silver Gelatin PrintBy Jack RobinsonLocated in Memphis, TNFashion designer and aristocrat Hubert de Givenchy, technically Count Hubert James Marcel Taffin de Givenchy, prepares his models for an upcoming sh...Category
1960s Black and White Photography
MaterialsPhotographic Film, Photographic Paper, Silver Gelatin