Caumont Centre d'Art

To mark the bicentenary of the birth of photography, Caumont-Centre d’Art is devoting its winter exhibition to Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004), one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century. Nicknamed “the eye of the century”, he captured the very essence of his subjects through the exceptional acuity of his gaze. The exhibition follows the photographer’s European travels through more than two hundred photographs, combining his most famous images with pictures rarely, if ever, shown before.

Henri Cartier-Bresson was a committed European. For nearly seventy years, from his beginnings in the 1930s until the end of his life, he never stopped travelling across Europe. Through the people he met on his journeys, their looks, gestures, festivals and customs, he painted a vibrant portrait of a territory in full transformation. The photographs that emerge reveal the distinctiveness of each of these peoples while underlining what deeply binds them together. Unique and sincere, they nourish the imagination of a Europe still under construction, with its many faces.

A major witness to the events of the twentieth century, he immortalised the great political and social upheavals of his time. He travelled the world and captured, through the lens of his camera, pivotal episodes of contemporary history: the last days of Gandhi in India, the victory of the Chinese communists, the “thaw” in Russia, or the United States of the 1960s, where he paid particular attention to the struggle against racial segregation. Europe nonetheless remained his anchor. He criss-crossed it, from the post-war years marked by ruins and trauma to the Cold War, when the first outlines of the European Union were taking shape. His camera became the witness of a continent being rebuilt.