Henri Cartier-Bresson: Watch! Watch! Watch!

As Ulrich Pohlmann, curator of the exhibition Henri Cartier-Bresson: Watch!, Watch!, Watch!, which Fundación MAPFRE is presenting at its KBr photography centre in Barcelona, points out, there will hardly be another photographer in the 20th century who has created such a rich and varied oeuvre as the French artist. Photojournalist, artistic photographer and portraitist, he created timeless compositions and marked the style of subsequent generations of photographers. With his talent for finding the ‘decisive moment’, he captured spontaneous encounters and situations and became one of the most important representatives of street photography. His works, many of which have become icons today, show, as if he were an anthropologist, some of the most important events of the 20th century.

The exhibition, divided into ten thematic and chronological sections, aims to reconstruct the original context of some of his photographs. Two hundred and forty original silver gelatin prints belonging to the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris—the author forbade copies of his images to be made after his death—which are accompanied by a painstaking selection of his publications in magazines and books, as well as a film and two documentaries made by the author himself.

Exhibition produced by Fundación MAPFRE in collaboration with the Bucerius Kunstforum in Hamburg and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris.