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“... At​ the Pompidou Centre in Paris, a two-hour wait will get you ‘priority access’ to the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition. It’s available only to friends of the museum, members of the press, and those who bought tickets in advance and naively thought they’d walk straight in. As the American woman behind me remarked, it’s the kind of queue that would be generated in the US by the opening weekend of Terminator 4 ...”

“... Like Titian’s, Cartier-Bresson’s work began as the mirror of one epoch and is ending as that of another, simply because he invented the best mirror and kept polishing it Cartier-Bresson’s influence has been immense since his beginnings, not just on photography but on cinema and photojournalism, so that he has been largely responsible for 20th-century notions of what a superior realistic camera image should look like ...”

“... the construction, of form. Of the photographers who have turned this kind of eye onto the world, Henri Cartier-Bresson is one of the two or three greatest. The way his pictures are taken and presented avoids the suppression of anything which falls within the viewfinder when he releases the shutter. The photographs are never cropped, the prints he has ...”

“... account of the photographer’s craft I know. They are relevant to work very unlike his own – to Cartier-Bresson’s collection Photoportraits, for example. The arena Avedon works in is execution yard and interrogation cell as well as stage and studio: ‘I photograph my subject against a sheet of white paper about nine feet wide by seven feet long ... I ...”

“... out of Sander’s taxonomy, People of the 20th Century, were it not for their local insignia. Henri Cartier-Bresson, for the purposes of this exhibition, is cast as a royal reporter. In 1937, his first year working for the French communist daily Ce Soir, he covered the coronation of George VI, turning his back on the royals to capture the event ...”

“... the moment their subject acquired a camera and took a first shot. We’re asked to conjure little Henri Cartier-Bresson, or Jacques Henri Lartigue, on holiday with his parents and a Box Brownie, everyone eager for images. Chris Killip, who was born in 1946 and died in 2020, had never owned a camera or taken a picture ...”

“... at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from 23 June until 25 September), many of them by Henri Cartier-Bresson, are especially beguiling. The painters’ lives were more troubled and difficult than the photographs suggest but, in the cases of Bonnard and Matisse in particular, one feels delightfully intimate with the painters and their ...”

“... Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, I.F. Stone – flocked to the Theresa’s ballroom, with Henri Cartier-Bresson on hand to capture it all. Other Third World leaders in New York that week could only complain of stolen limelight. Kwame Nkrumah, who had worked in a soap factory in Harlem in his twenties, found himself relegated to second fiddle in ...”

“... paper set up in the 1950s when its predecessor the Guardian was banned. He had become a devotee of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Poring over editions of The Decisive Moment (1952) and The People of Moscow (1955), he began to conceive a book of his own that would ‘show the world what the white South African had done to the Black’. But freelancing for New Age ...”

“... poison: they insist on the poison without any overwhelming fear of the costs. David Bowie and Henri Cartier-Bresson, not contra-cabaret overall, were separately and summarily dismissed from the Colony for requesting tea.In former times, before we took the pledge, Soho had 24-hour allure. On my way home one night, I left a famous screenwriter behind ...”

“... his art. Asked how he found the ‘decisive moment’, the catchphrase always associated with Cartier-Bresson (though first used in the 17th century by the Cardinal de Retz), he replied: ‘You do it before you have time to think.’ There was no technical secret at all. ‘I used to be a tennis player, so I have a very fast eye.’ When congratulated on ...”

“... an elegance of composition and an affection for the Parisian demimonde reminiscent of Brassaï and Cartier-Bresson. He flirted with the idea of moving to New York, after falling in love with Sara Elizabeth Penn, a glamorous Black expatriate he met at a party. In 1957, Penn returned to New York, and waited for him to arrive.He never did. Late that year, he ...”