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One of my favourite photos - I Place de l'Europe Gare Saint Lazare

Place de l'Europe is one of Cartier-Bresson's most successful images. The snapshot of a man gleefully hopping over a flooded area in Paris captures the moment just before the man's heel hits the water. The instant is filled with a sort of dynamic anticipation. A hazily-captured building in the distance contrasts with the richly ornamented, spiked fence and the two diverse elements combine in an alchemy of lines, curves, and reflections that creates the urban background for the jumper. Diagonal to the figure is a poster featuring a finely-drawn image of a female dancer leaping gracefully into the air. The poster for a circus called "Railowsky" is a visual play on the jumper's stiff stride that extends in a blur across the picture frame.

The spontaneity of the photo, which was captured in the bustling urban space, the Place de l'Europe outside of the busy Paris train station of Saint Lazare, epitomized the new, fast-paced environment in Europe with its trains, cars, and factories. Modern motion is celebrated by the fact that it is forever stopped, the leaping man will never hit the puddle, the split-second image is permanently frozen in time. The improvements in camera technology allowed for such images to be made and this progress is celebrated in Cartier-Bresson's photographs.

The iconic railway served as the setting for many famous 20th-century painters such as Manet, Caillebotte, and Monet, all of whom had been influential in Cartier-Bresson's own artistic development. This photo would also come to embody what he later described as the "decisive moment" - that instant a photographer decides to press the shutter and the event it memorializes.

Place de l'Europe is one of only a few photographs that Cartier-Bresson ever chose to crop. Ordinarily, he avoided adjusting his work after originally framing a shot and instead embraced unmediated chance encounters, an aesthetic preference and practice that made him one of the founders of street photography. A fragment of the fence that he is behind can be seen in the original shot and partially obscures the view.

Henri Cartier-Bresson -

Cartier-Bresson's work spanned photographic genres for the entirety of his long career. He is regarded as a pioneer of candid and street photography but he is also well-known for having produced some of the most compelling photographic portraits of notables ranging from Jean-Paul Sartre and Leonard Bernstein to Marilyn Monroe and Malcolm X. An early user of 35mm film, Cartier-Bresson preferred never to use the darkroom to adjust his photographs, a choice that enhanced the spontaneity of his images and emphasized what he called "the decisive moment." No single photographer is more closely linked to the development of modern photojournalism than is Cartier-Bresson, whose itinerant nature brought him to some of the most momentous events and sites in modern history - from the liberation of Paris from Nazi occupation to the assassination of Mahatma Ghandi.

To enhance his capacity to take the kind of candid shots he preferred, Cartier-Bresson often wrapped his Leica camera in black tape to make it less obtrusive. Assuming the role of the modern flâneur, his camera became an extension of his eye as he wandered, seeking visually, psychologically, and intellectually stimulating visual material. Ironically, while Cartier-Bresson could linger for hours observing, patiently awaiting the perfect shot, he was always poised to make the snap decisions required to seize a given moment to fix in time.

Cartier-Bresson co-founded The Magnum Photo agency - a cooperative owned by its members -that connected the photographers with clients around the world. The agency's mission was to widely disseminate photographs that were in one way or another exemplary of the modern era and also inherently humanitarian.

In addition to still photography, Cartier-Bresson was an accomplished filmmaker, who first became interested in the medium when he worked with Jean Renoir. His filmography includes nearly ten films and he is regarded as an influential figure in the development of cinéma verité.

‘Wobble pumping’.