Henri Cartier-Bresson

French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson was born on August 22 in Chanteloup, Seine et Marne, into a wealthy family home. His grandfather and father were textile manufacturers, but Henri Cartier-Bresson decided to study painting. He attended several art schools in Paris in the 1920s, and from 1926 his teacher was André Lhote. Henri Cartier-Bresson moved in the circle of the Surrealists, whose painting he admired. But he also discovered photography for himself. In 1931, in the magazine "Arts et Métiers Graphiques", he saw a photo of children playing in the waves, their bodies appearing almost only as dark silhouettes against the white surf. This photo, "Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika" by the Hungarian photographer Martin Munkácsi, gave Henri Cartier-Bresson an inkling of the possibilities of photography and impressed him so much that he decided to become a photographer.