Exhibition catalog with 100 full page illustrations and 200 supporting pictures, covers development of contemporary photography in France. Includes critical texts and brief biographies of the photographers. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A deep dive into the pioneering collection of nineteenth-century French photographs, equipment, and ephemera, which is a cornerstone of the George Eastman Museum In the early twentieth century, Parisian photographer, amateur historian, and collector Gabriel Cromer (1873-1934) amassed a collection that traced photography's prehistory, invention, and development to about 1890. His dream was to found a national museum of the photographic arts in France. Although Cromer's ambition was never realized, his collection was central to establishing the world's first museum dedicated to photography: the George Eastman Museum. The Cromer Collection of Nineteenth‑Century French Photography considers the origin and circulation of the collection as well as the influence it has had on photography as a field of study. The book's six essays, written by French and American scholars, explore the Cromer Collection's complex passage across markets, borders, and functions. For more than half a century, curators and scholars worldwide have drawn extensively on the Gabriel Cromer Collection for exhibitions and publications; this book provides the first focused scholarly study of the foundational resource.

A richly illustrated look at some of the most important photobooks of the 20th century France experienced a golden age of photobook production from the late 1920s through the 1950s. Avant-garde experiments in photography, text, design, and printing, within the context of a growing modernist publishing scene, contributed to an outpouring of brilliantly designed books. Making Strange offers a detailed examination of photobook innovation in France, exploring seminal publications by Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Pierre Jahan, William Klein, and Germaine Krull. Kim Sichel argues that these books both held a mirror to their time and created an unprecedented modernist visual language. Sichel provides an engaging analysis through the lens of materiality, emphasizing the photobook as an object with which the viewer interacts haptically as well as visually. Rich in historical context and beautifully illustrated, Making Strange reasserts the role of French photobooks in the history of modern art.

One of the most famous books in the history of photography, this volume assembles Cartier-Bresson's best work from his early years.

This book offers an outstanding retrospective collection of the master of 20th-century photography, Henri Cartier-Bresson. Reproduced in exquisite black and white, the images in this book range from Henri Cartier-Bresson's earliest work in France, Spain, and Mexico through his postwar travels in Asia, the US, and Russia, and even include landscapes from the 1970s, when he retired his camera to pursue drawing. While his instinct for capturing what he called the decisive moment was unparalleled, as a photojournalist Cartier-Bresson was uniquely concerned with the human impact of historic events. In his photographs of the liberation of France from the Nazis, the death of Ghandi, and the creation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Cartier-Bresson focused on the reactions of the crowds rather than the subjects of the events. And while his portraits of Sartre, Giacometti, Faulkner, Capote, and other artists are iconic, he gave equal attention to those forgotten by history: a dead resistance fighter lying on the bank of the Rhine, children playing alongside the Berlin Wall, and a eunuch in Peking's Imperial Court. Divided into six thematic sections, the book presents the photographs in spare double-page spreads. In a handwritten note included at the end of the book, Cartier-Bresson writes, "In order to give meaning to the world, one must feel involved in what one singles out through the viewfinder." His work shows how he has been able to capture the decisive moment with such extreme humility and profound humanity.