In a 1971 essay, Hilton Kramer praised Henri Cartier-Bresson’s (1908–2004) immense talent for photography:

I think of Henry James’s comment on a visitor’s (obviously his own) first experience of the Théâtre Français: “He has heard all his life of attention to detail, and now, for the first time, he sees something that deserves that name.”

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has recently installed an extensive retrospective of Cartier-Bresson’s work, which elevated the documentary style to high art. “The Modern Century” explores twentieth-century change, not only in the medium of photography, which was influenced by the advent of magazine journalism, but also in societies across the globe, from ancient cultures to a postwar Europe. The show includes 300 gelatin silver prints, and those with negative dates up to and including 1935 were printed by the photographer. All post–World War II images were printed by others, and many in fact cannot be dated with absolute accuracy.

Cartier-Bresson discovered the Leica, a handheld camera, when he went to Africa in 1930. The trip launched a half-century of travel documenting disparate subjects, from Fascism and the advent of world war, to the Chinese Communist revolution, to the offices of the Bankers Trust Company in the 1960s—a model of the American prosperity and ingenuity that had become the envy of the world. Cartier-Bresson sought to portray universals in human experience, what he called the sameness of man, but with rigorous classicism and attention to form. This first posthumous