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Description: inscribed 'Henri à Peter, avec mes amitiés' by the photographer in pencil on the reverse, 1933

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Dimensions: 6 1/2 by 9 5/8 in. (16.5 by 24.5 cm.)

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Provenance: The photographer to 'Peter,' likely Peter Powell
To private collector(s)

Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York Acquired by the present owner from the above

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Published: Other prints of this image:

Peter Galassi, Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Work (The Museum of Modern Art, 1987), p. 107

Robert Delpire, et al, Henri Cartier-Bresson: Photographer (New York Graphic Society, 1979), p. 89

Jean-Pierre Montier, Henri Cartier-Bresson and the Artless Art (Bulfinch Press, 1996), pl. 166, p. 169

Daniel Wolf, The Art of Photography, 1839-1989 (Yale University Press, 1989), pl. 280

Ben Maddow, Faces (New York Graphic Society, 1977), pl. 495

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Notes: The Peter to whom Cartier-Bresson inscribed this print is almost certainly Peter Powell, an American expatriate that the young photographer met in Paris in 1927 or 1928. A portrait of Cartier-Bresson by Powell's wife, Gretchen, is reproduced in Peter Galassi's Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Work, page 18. Vintage prints from this period of Cartier-Bresson's career are rare. Galassi writes, 'In the early 1930s, Henri Cartier-Bresson made his own prints but he did not make a great many, since his audience at the time was very small. The great majority of surviving prints were made for exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery; a few others were gifts to friends' (ibid., p. 143).

Working with a small hand-held 35mm camera, and cleverly combining Surrealist aesthetics with a straightforward photojournalist approach, Cartier-Bresson produced in the 1930s a body of images notable for their complexity. As Galassi points out, Cartier-Bresson's genius is evident sometimes in what he chose to leave outside the frame of a picture. In Valencia, there is no explanation present in the picture for the young boy's outstretched arms and ecstatic expression. In fact, the boy is awaiting the descent of a ball that has just been thrown in the air. Galassi writes, 'Cartier-Bresson's visceral intuition, the Surrealist principle of dislocation, and the instantaneity of the Leica, have come together to transform the ordinary incident into an image of rapture' (ibid., p.36). Galassi quotes from Ben Maddow's review of the photographer's 1947 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art:

'The ball itself, the ordinary cause, is not seen; in fact it can hardly be guessed. Because now the child has been enlarged into a legendary figure. The wall behind him, with the whitewash coming off, is inscribed with fabulous organic shapes. The child is bending back, but as if stabbed, and suffering not pain but ecstasy. The slice of time has become enormous in importance, and its hidden meaning is now perfectly plain, though so complex it can hardly be written down' (ibid.).