HENRI CARTIER-BRESSONwas born in Chanteloup-en-Brie, near Paris, France, the eldest of fi ve children.

The Cartier-Bresson family lived in a bour-geois neighborhood in Paris, near the Europe Bridge, and provided him with fi -nancial support to develop his interests in photography in a more independent man-ner than many of his contemporaries.As a young boy, Cartier-Bresson owned a Box Brownie, using it for taking holiday snapshots; he later experimented with a 3×4 inch view camera. Cartier-Bresson stud-ied in Paris at the École Fénelon, a Catholic school. His uncle Louis, a gifted painter, in-troduced Cartier-Bresson to oil painting.

Cartier-Bresson also studied painting with society portraitist Jacques Émile Blanche. During this period he read Dostoevsky, Schopenhauer, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Mallar-

mé, Freud, Proust, Joyce, Hegel, Engels and Marx. Lhote took his pupils to the Louvre to study classical artists and to Parisian gal-leries to study contemporary art. Cartier-Bresson’s interest in modern art was com-bined with an admiration for the works of the Renaissance—of masterpieces from Jan van Eyck, Paolo Uccello, Masaccio and Piero della Francesca.

While still studying at Lhote’s studio, Cartier-Bresson began socializing with the Surrealists at the Café Cyrano, in the Place Blanche. He met a number of the movement’s leading protagonists, and was particularly drawn to the Surrealist move-ment of linking the subconscious and the immediate to their work. He became inspired by a 1931 photograph by Hungarian photojournalist Martin Munkacsi showing three naked young African boys, caught in near-silhouette,

running into the surf of Lake Tanganyika. Titled Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika, this captured the freedom, grace and sponta-neity of their movement and their joy at being alive.

He acquired the Leica camera with 50mm lens in Marseilles that would accompany him for many years. He described the Leica as an extension of his eye.[citation need-ed] The anonymity that the small camera gave him in a crowd or during an intimate moment was essential in overcoming the formal and unnatural behavior of those who were aware of being photographed. The Leica opened up new possibilities in photography — the ability to capture the world in its actual state of movement and transformation.

In spring 1947, Cartier-Bresson, with Robert Capa, David “Chim” Seymour, William “Bill”

Vandivert, and George Rodger founded Magnum Photos. Magnum’s mission was to “feel the pulse” of the times and some of its fi rst projects were People Live Every-where, Youth of the World, Women of the World and The Child Generation. Magnum aimed to use photography in the service of humanity, and provided arresting, widely viewed images.

Cartier-Bresson’s photography took him many places on the globe – China, Mexico, Canada, the United States, India, Japan, So-viet Union and many other countries. He became the fi rst Western photographer to photograph “freely” in the post-war Soviet Union. In 1968, he began to turn away from photography and return to his passion for drawing and painting.

Cartier-Bresson exclusively used Leica 35 mm rangefi nder cameras equipped with normal 50mm lenses or occasionally a wide-angle for landscapes.[citation need-ed] He often wrapped black tape around the camera’s chrome body to make it less conspicuous. With fast black and white fi lms and sharp lenses, he was able to pho-tograph almost by stealth to capture the events. No longer bound by a huge 4×5 press camera or an awkward two and a quarter inch twin-lens refl ex camera, min-iature-format cameras gave Cartier-Bres-son what he called “the velvet hand [and] the hawk’s eye.”[citation needed] He never photographed with fl ash, a practice he saw as “[i]mpolite...like coming to a con-cert with a pistol in your hand.”[citation needed] He believed in composing his

photographs in his camera and not in the darkroom, showcasing this belief by hav-ing nearly all his photographs printed only at full-frame and completely free of any cropping or other darkroom manipulation -- indeed, he emphasized that the entire negative had been used by extending the area reproduced on the print to include a thick black border around the frame.Cartier-Bresson worked exclusively in black and white, other than a few unsuccessful attempts in color. He never developed or made his own prints.[citation needed] He said: “I’ve never been interested in the pro-cess of photography, never, never. Right from the beginning. For me, photography with a small camera like the Leica is an in-stant drawing.”[citation needed]

WILLIAM EGGLESTON(born July 27, 1939) is an American photog-rapher. He is widely credited with securing recognition for color photography as a le-gitimate artistic medium to display in art galleries. As a boy, Eggleston was introvert-ed and enjoyed playing the piano, draw-ing, and working with electronics. From an early age, he was drawn to visual media; he reportedly enjoyed buying postcards and cutting out pictures from magazines.

Eggleston attended Vanderbilt University for a year, Delta State College for a semes-ter, and the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) for approximately fi ve years, never earning a college degree. However, it was during college that his interest in pho-

tography took root; during his fi rst year in college, a friend gave Eggleston a Leica camera. Eggleston took art classes at Ole Miss and was introduced to abstract ex-pressionism by a visiting painter from New York named Tom Young.

Eggleston’s early photographic efforts were inspired by the work of Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank and by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’s book, The Decisive Moment. At fi rst photograph-ing in black-and-white, Eggleston began experimenting with color photography in 1965 and 1966, and color transparency fi lm became his dominant medium in the late sixties. Eggleston’s development as a pho-tographer seems to have taken place in relative isolation from other artists.

Eggleston taught at Harvard in 1973 and 1974, and it was during this period when he discovered dye-transfer printing when he was examining the price list of a photo-graphic lab in Chicago. As Eggleston later recalled: “It advertised ‘from the cheapest to the ultimate print.’ The ultimate print was a dye-transfer. I went straight up there to look and everything I saw was commer-cial work like pictures of cigarette packs or perfume bottles but the colour saturation and the quality of the ink was overwhelm-ing. I couldn’t wait to see what a plain Eggleston picture would look like with the same process. Every photograph I subse-quently printed with the process seemed fantastic and each one seemed better than the previous one.” The dye-transfer process resulted in some of Eggleston’s

most striking and famous work, such as his 1973 photograph entitled The Red Ceiling, of which Eggleston said, “The Red Ceiling is so powerful, that in fact I’ve never seen it reproduced on the page to my satisfac-tion. When you look at the dye it is like red blood that’s wet on the wall.... A little red is usually enough, but to work with an entire red surface was a challenge.”

Eggleston’s mature work is characterized by its ordinary subject-matter. As Eudora Welty noted in her introduction to The Democratic Forest, an Eggleston photo-graph might include “old tyres, Dr Pep-per machines, discarded air-conditioners, vending machines, empty and dirty Coca-

Cola bottles, torn posters, power poles and power wires, street barricades, one-way signs, detour signs, No Parking signs, park-ing meters and palm trees crowding the same kerb.”

Eggleston has a unique ability to fi nd beauty, and striking displays of color, in ordinary scenes. A dog trotting toward the camera; a Moose lodge; a woman standing by a rural road; a row of country mailboxes; a convenience store; the lobby of a Krystal fast-food restaurant -- all of these ordinary scenes take on new signifi cance in the rich colors of Eggleston’s photographs. Eudora Welty suggests that Eggleston sees the complexity and beauty of the mundane

world: “The extraordinary, compelling, hon-est, beautiful and unsparing photographs all have to do with the quality of our lives in the ongoing world: they succeed in showing us the grain of the present, like the cross-section of a tree.... They focus on the mundane world. But no subject is fuller of implications than the mundane world!”

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON &WILLIAM EGGLESTON