Tete a Tete: Portraits by Henri Cartier-Bresson - Hardcover

Cartier-Bresson, Henri; Gombrich, E. H.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0821225626 ISBN 13: 9780821225622

Publisher: Bulfinch Pr, 1998

Synopsis

A selection of Cartier-Bresson's most memorable portraits, published to accompany the 1998 National Portrait Gallery exhibition. The photographer himself supervised the design of the book and the juxtaposition of the images. Sir Ernst Gombrich provides an introduction to the collection.

About this title

Review:

Henri Cartier-Bresson's Tête a Tête, his portraits of some of the most potent icons of the latter half of the 20th century, is an understated yet powerful and challenging book: a masterpiece of the photographer's art of composition and expression. Presented in non-chronological order, yet arranged so as to provide links and parallels in posture and facial likenesses, familiar icons easily mix with anonymous subjects. A very young Truman Capote in crumpled T-shirt, on the brink of literary fame; a very old Colette, but retaining her inquisitorial gaze; Matisse with his birds, Sartre with his pipe, Igor Stravinsky, astonishingly similar in 1946 and 1967; a beaming Che Guevara. There are also group portraits of unknowns, but none the less resonant for that: besuited men in 1950s Iran, tribes people from Kashmir, prostitutes in Mexico, the women of southern Spain, dressed eternally in black. As the art historian EH Gombrich comments in his introduction to Tête a Tête, Cartier-Bresson, in these portraits, moves significantly away from the received techniques of the "society" photographer. Instead, he "always preferred to lie in wait for the telling moment". --Catherine Taylor

About this edition

• Publisher: Bulfinch Pr
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0821225626
• ISBN 13: 9780821225622
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 144