From the age of 22, the French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) was on the road most of the time, always with camera in hand. While he experimented surrealism through street photography in the early 1930s, he then turned to photojournalism after World War II. Cartier-Bresson is notably known for his concept of “decisive moment”, which aspires to fix a precise instant, the instantaneous, the intuitive. His incessant travels enabled him to capture countless places across the world, including China during the Great Leap Forward that took place in 1958. The photographs above were taken in the late 1950s while Cartier-Bresson was working on an assignment for LIFE, the famous American magazine. The author offers a far-reaching visual account of the modern century, capturing the changing everyday life in China, both in astounding black and white and color photographs.
