Henri Cartier-Bresson

A first edition of Images a la Sauvette by Henri Cartier-Bresson.

• Henri Cartier-Bresson (French).
• Paris: Éditions Verve, 1952.
• Large quarto.
• 154 pages.
• Black-and-white photographs printed in gravure by Draeger.
• Text in French, by Cartier-Bresson.
• Design by Tériade and Marguerite Lang.
• Plain endpapers, printed white paper-covered boards illustrated after a design by Matisse in black, blue and green.

Images à la Sauvette was conceived by Tériade (pseud. of Elfstratios Eleftheriades), editor of Minotaure and founder of Verve, who made a number of deluxe illustrated books with artists such as Matisse, Miró, and Léger. The photographs in this collection perfectly illustrate Cartier-Bresson’s notion of ‘l’instant décisif’. In his preface Cartier-Bresson writes ‘To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression... if the shutter was released at the decisive moment, you have instinctively fixed a geometric pattern without which the photograph would have been both formless and lifeless.’