Cartier-Bresson On View

Many people consider him the finest photographer of all time.
He is certainly the father of modern photojournalism.
He was a photographic pioneer; someone who seemed to possess the natural ability to capture a moment - what the called the "decisive moment" - with an astonishing eye for even the smallest detail.
Though his photographs are spontaneous, they seem perfect. Each one tells a story.
In fact, these seemingly precise black-and-white images could not be improved upon even if they were posed and calibrated to the last detail.
He was an artist with a camera, a genius behind the lens.
He was Henri Cartier-Bresson and 49 of his classic photographs are on view through May 2 at the Edwynn Houk Gallery in Manhattan.
To see these prints is to thrill at the power of the still camera.
The show consists entirely of vintage and early prints. It includes work from France, Mexico, Spain and Italy taken in the 1930s, from China and India in the 1940s, and from the U.S. in the 1960s.
Cartier-Bresson is regarded as one of the art world's most unassuming personalities. He disliked publicity and exhibited a ferocious shyness since his days in hiding from the Nazis during World War II. Although he took many famous portraits, his own face was little known to the world at large (which presumably had the advantage of allowing him to work on the street in peace). He dismissed others' applications of the term "art" to his photographs, which he thought were merely his gut reactions to moments in time that he had happened upon.
Here's what The Master, himself said about photography:
"The simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression... . In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotif."