Tete a Tete - Hardcover

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0821225626 ISBN 13: 9780821225622

Publisher: Bulfinch, 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 à Tête contains the photographer's portraits of some of the most potent icons of the latter half of the 20th century. The book is understated, yet powerful and challenging--a masterpiece of the photographer's art of composition and expression. Presented in nonchronological order, yet arranged 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, who retains 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, tribespeople from Kashmir, prostitutes in Mexico, the women of southern Spain, dressed eternally in black. As the art historian E.H. Gombrich comments in his introduction to Tête à Tête, in these portraits Cartier-Bresson moved significantly away from the received techniques of the "society" photographer. Instead, he "always preferred to lie in wait for the telling moment." --Catherine Taylor, Amazon.co.uk

About the Author:

Henri Cartier-Bresson is one of this century's leading photographers and his career has profoundly influenced the field. His earliest images are of Europe in the 1930s and 40s; he later traveled throughout the world, to the United States, India, Japan, China, Mexico, the Soviet Union, to frame the world with his camera.

Sir Ernst Gombrich is one of the most important and renowned art historians of his generation whose own books include The Story of Art and The Essential Gombrich.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bulfinch
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0821225626
• ISBN 13: 9780821225622
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144