Rue Mouffetard, Paris, is a black and white photograph taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson in a Paris street in 1954.
The picture is one of the best known of the artist and is named from the street where the event was caught on camera. It was taken candidly in the Rue Mouffetard, in Paris, and it exemplifies what he described as the decisive moment. The picture is also one of the best examples of the genre of street photography, which was cultivated by the author. [1] The atmosphere of the photograph is very light-hearted. It depicts a young smiling child, named Michel Gabriel, carrying two bottles of wine. Behind him, at the left, the blurred image shows two girls that watch him amused. Two adult women, also blurred, are seen at the bottom left, of those only one is looking at the scene. [2] [3]
There are prints of this photograph at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, in Paris, the Museum of Fine Arts, in Houston, and at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York. [4] [5] [6]
Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French artist and humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35mm film. He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment.
Street photography is photography conducted for art or inquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places, usually with the aim of capturing images at a decisive or poignant moment by careful framing and timing. Although there is a difference between street and candid photography, it is usually subtle with most street photography being candid in nature and some candid photography being classifiable as street photography. Street photography does not necessitate the presence of a street or even the urban environment. Though people usually feature directly, street photography might be absent of people and can be of an object or environment where the image projects a decidedly human character in facsimile or aesthetic.
Robert Doisneau was a French photographer. From the 1930s, he photographed the streets of Paris. He was a champion of humanist photography and with Henri Cartier-Bresson a pioneer of photojournalism.
Helen Levitt was an American photographer and cinematographer. She was particularly noted for her street photography around New York City. David Levi Strauss described her as "the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time."
Rue Mouffetard is a street in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, France.
Jim Goldberg is an American artist and photographer, whose work reflects long-term, in-depth collaborations with neglected, ignored, or otherwise outside-the-mainstream populations.
Saul Leiter was an American photographer and painter whose early work in the 1940s and 1950s was an important contribution to what came to be recognized as the New York school of photography.
Louis Faurer was an American candid or street photographer. He was a quiet artist who never achieved the broad public recognition that his best-known contemporaries did; however, the significance and caliber of his work were lauded by insiders, among them Robert Frank, William Eggleston, and Edward Steichen, who included his work in the Museum of Modern Art exhibitions In and Out of Focus (1948) and The Family of Man (1955).
Fazal Sheikh is an artist who uses photographs to document people living in displaced and marginalized communities around the world.
Olivier Meyer is a French photographer born in 1957. He lives and works in Paris, France.
Richard Nagler is an American businessman and photographer. Four monographs of his photography have been published. His photography has been exhibited in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe; and included in public and private collections. The work has also been featured in publications including: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Artforum International, Artweek, The Los Angeles Times, Playboy Magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle. Nagler graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1969 magna cum laude/Phi Beta Kappa with a B. A. in politics and philosophy, and began his career in photography in the 1970s. Richard Nagler is also a book reviewer specializing in photography and other fine arts for The New York Journal of Books.
Humanist Photography, also known as the School of Humanist Photography, manifests the Enlightenment philosophical system in social documentary practice based on a perception of social change. It emerged in the mid-twentieth-century and is associated most strongly with Europe, particularly France, where the upheavals of the two world wars originated, though it was a worldwide movement. It can be distinguished from photojournalism, with which it forms a sub-class of reportage, as it is concerned more broadly with everyday human experience, to witness mannerisms and customs, than with newsworthy events, though practitioners are conscious of conveying particular conditions and social trends, often, but not exclusively, concentrating on the underclasses or those disadvantaged by conflict, economic hardship or prejudice. Humanist photography "affirms the idea of a universal underlying human nature". Jean Claude Gautrand describes humanist photography as:
a lyrical trend, warm, fervent, and responsive to the sufferings of humanity [which] began to assert itself during the 1950s in Europe, particularly in France ... photographers dreamed of a world of mutual succour and compassion, encapsulated ideally in a solicitous vision.
Peter Johnston Galassi is an American writer, curator, and art historian working in the field of photography. His principal fields are photography and nineteenth-century French art.
Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare is a black and white photograph taken by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris in 1932. The picture has variable dimensions, according to the different prints, being one of them of 44,8 by 29,8 cm. It is one of his best known and more critically acclaimed photographs and became iconic of his style that attempted to capture the decisive moment in photography. The photograph was considered one of the 100 most influential pictures of all time by Time magazine.
Hyères, France is a black and white photograph taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1932. It is one of the photographs from the year when he started taking photography more professionally. He took then many pictures in France and in other countries, like Italy, Spain, Morocco and Mexico, with his portable Leica camera.
The Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, also known as Fondation HCB, is an art gallery and non-profit organisation in Paris that was established to preserve and show the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Martine Franck, and show the work of others. It was set up in 2003 by the photographer and painter Cartier-Bresson, his wife, also a photographer, Franck, and their daughter, Mélanie Cartier-Bresson.
Gold Rush, Shanghai, also known by other titles like Gold Rush. The Last Days of Kuomintang, Shanghai, is a black and white photograph taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1948.
Juvisy, France, with the French title of Dimanche sur les Bords de Marne, Juvisy, is a black and white photograph taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1938. The picture shows his influence and formation in painting and went to become one of his most known photographs.
Alberto Giacometti à la Galerie Maeght, Paris, France, 1961, or, in English, Alberto Giacometti at the Galerie Maeght, Paris, France, 1961, is a black and white photograph by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, taken in 1961. The picture depicts his old friend of two decades, the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, as he appears to be setting up his own exhibition at the Galerie Maeght, in Paris.
Coronation of King George VI, London, England is a black and white photograph taken by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, in 1937. Cartier-Bresson covered the coronation of King George VI, in London, on 12 May 1937, for the French Communist weekly Regards, focusing more on the people who were attending the official procession than in the event itself.