![]() Three months later, the book was released to critical acclaim and solidified Cartier-Bresson as one of the great photographers of his time. The results were so outstanding that Walker Evans in his New York Times review wrote of the book’s “breathtaking quality.” On July 22, 1952, the book went to press and 10,000 copies (roughly 3,000 French and 7,000 English language copies) were inked in heliogravure by the best printers of the time: the Draeger brothers. The photographer and theoretician Minor White noted his own opinions about the book’s division, “In his early work, form often dominates content,” adding, “the early pictures show a man more involved with his personal world than with the outer world The later work shows a decided preoccupation with content, the human, social or political meaning – his outer world.” According to Clément Chéroux, who penned this new edition’s informative essay on the book’s genesis, Cartier-Bresson’s decision to break the sequence into these two sections also corresponds to the formation of Magnum Photos in 1947, and subsequently, a moment in the artist’s life when he decided to commit himself to photojournalism. ![]() The final edit of 126 photographs taken between 19 appear roughly chronological but divided in the book into two sections – the first section (with exception to two images) corresponds to the years 1932 to 1947 and comprising photographs from Western countries and the second (with one exception) between 19 with photographs made in the East – China, India, Indonesia and the Middle East. It was one of these book dummies that Cartier-Bresson had shown to the artist who would design and paint the exquisite and notably ‘non-photographic’ cover boards – Henri Matisse. By the end of that year, the photographer had begun mining his archives for the photographs, editing and sequencing them and by March of 1952, three copies of a dummy were prepared. By June, Cartier-Bresson was in his own discussion with Tériade in France about a French-American co-edition between Tériade and Simon and Schuster Publishing. Initial mentions of the project came in May of 1951 with an assistant at the Magnum Photos office in Paris gathering images for the literary agent Armitage Watkins to show to a possible publisher – Richard Simon of Simon and Schuster Publishing. Aside from a small exhibition catalog for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Decisive Moment was Cartier-Bresson’s first real book. In a letter to Marc Riboud he wrote, “Magazines end up wrapping French fries or being thrown in the bin, while books remain.” As early as 1933, Cartier-Bresson had begun one of many different proposed book projects with the intent to publish something of a monograph, but all had failed to be realized for one reason or another. ![]() Henri Cartier-Bresson had an early interest in the photo book as a public vehicle for his work. ![]()
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