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In this video, the host invites a few scientists from The Field Museum to apply their taxonomic know-how on something we're all familiar with: candy.

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This video features candy and explores different ways of classifying candy, such as colour, shape and ingredients. More importantly it realises the juxtaposition of applying advanced taxonomic schemes to something as commonplace as candy, showing that taxonomy can be used in many aspects of everyday life and that people can define their own taxonomy according to their personal preferences and needs.

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After researching the second taxonomy and learning about the work of Roni horn, I was more keen in exploring a third classification that would connect my collection of landscape photographs with personal emotions, so I undertook the following further research.

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Roni Horn (born New York, 1955) began making art in the mid-1970s and has been exhibiting internationally for over 30 years. Her work is extremely diverse and this exhibition includes drawings, books, photographic installations and sculptures. Each room brings together works made in different media from different periods of Horn's career. Works in some rooms echo with paired works in later rooms.

At the heart of Horn's practice is an approach to identity that sees it as mutable and multiple rather than as single and fixed. 'Identity is a river', Horn once said. She relates this to the idea of androgyny: 'Androgyny is the possibility of a thing containing multiple identities. Integrating difference is the basis of identity, not the exclusion of it. You are this and this and that.' Her interest in multiplicity is evident in the diversity of her work and borne out in particular pieces such as photographs that look at the complex nature of water, or sculptures whose identity shifts with time and movement. Another related concern is place: Horn is interested in places that are often themselves mutable, in the process of 'becoming'.

While many artists of her generation explore identity politics and geography through representation and depiction, Horn's ideas about identity and place emerge through the viewer's encounter with her works. 'I want to make the meaning of a work people's experience of it', she has said. The viewer plays an active role as their experiences unfold.

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roni horn aka roni horn: explore the exhibition

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Roni Horn aka Roni Horn: explore the exhibition, introduction: Introduction | Tate

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Roni Horn (born New York, 1955) began making art in the mid-1970s and has been exhibiting internationally for over 30 years. Her work is extremely diverse and this exhibition includes drawings, books, photographic installations and sculptures. Each room brings together works made in different media from different periods of Horn's career.

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Taxonomy a system for naming, identifying and organizing things, especially plants and animals, into groups that share similar qualities. Taxonomy is the methodology and principles of systematic botany and zoology and sets up arrangements of the kinds of plants and animals in hierarchies of superior and subordinate groups.

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Begun in 1924 and left unfinished at the time of his death in 1929, the is Aby Warburg's attempt to map the "afterlife of antiquity," or how images of great symbolic, intellectual, and emotional power emerge in Western antiquity and then reappear and are reanimated in the art and cosmology of later times and places, from Alexandrian Greece to Weimar Germany. Focusing especially on the Renaissance, the historical period where he found the struggle between the forces of reason and unreason to be most palpable, Warburg hoped that the Mnemosyne Atlas would allow its spectators to experience for themselves the "polarities" that riddle culture and thought.

Warburg's combinatory experiments in the Atlas follow his own metonymic, intuitive logic, even as it is propelled by decades of rigorous scholarship. Warburg believe that these symbolic images, when juxtaposed and then placed in sequence, could foster immediate, synoptic insights into the afterlife of pathos-charged images depicting what he dubbed "bewegtes Leben" ( life in motion or animated life). As such, the Mnemosyne Atlas strives to make the ineffable process of historical change and recurrence immanent and comprehensible. More specifically, the Atlas would chart both the afterlife of the classical language of gestures in Renaissance art and beyond as well as the migration of Greek cosmological symbolism up through to the moment when Bruno and Kepler tried to reconcile the legacies of classical and astrological thought with the discoveries of early modern astronomy. The Atlas functions cartographically, too, as it explores how meanings are constituted by the movement of themes and styles between East and West, North and South. Transforming the cartographic and scientific notions of what an "atlas" should be, Warburg creates a dynamic "thought-space" [ Denkraum] where cosmographic and art-historical images reveal how subjective and objective forces shape Western culture.

In its "last version," the Mnemosyne Atlas consisted of sixty-three panels ( Tafeln). Using wooden boards, measuring approximately 150 x 200 cm and covered with black cloth, Warburg arranged and rearranged, in a lengthy combinatory process of addition and substraction, black and white photographs of art-historical and cosmographical images. Here and there he also included photographs of maps, manuscript pages, and contemporary images drawn from newspapers and magazines. The individual panels, in turn, were then numbered and ordered to create still larger thematic sequences.

While in his later years Warburg increasingly deployed such panels in his lectures and presentations (most famously in his Hertziana lecture in Rome in 1929), he also hoped to publish the Mnemosyne Atlas. Indeed, he planned to supplement a volume of plates with two volumes of text, containing historical and interpretive material. However, as he left the Atlas at the time of his death, the balance of word and image is decidedly tilted toward the latter. It is left to us latecomers, then, to carefully supplement the gaps, to connect the Wanderstrassen that Warburg adumbrated. This can be done in myriad ways: by adducing his published and unpublished writings; by further mining and explicating Warburg's own sources; by weighing subsequent scholarship on the artists, the eras, the questions, that fascinated Warburg; by conceiving new ways to map the territories that he first adumbrated; and by deepening and extending his insights and methods, either by applying them to new materials and/or in order to reflect on the nature of historical knowledge and scholarship more generally.

But back to the Mnemosyne Atlas. The actual panels of the "last version" are no longer extant; only black and white photographs (18 x 24 cm) of them remain, held in the archives of the Warburg Institute. However, seventy-one years after Warburg's death, Martin Warnke with the assistance of Claudia Brink, produced a magnificent edition of the atlas based on the "last version." [See Der Bilderatlas: Mnemosyne in Warburg's Gesammelte Schriften, II.1 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000 [reprinted in 2003, 2008]). The other volumes in the Gesammelte Schriften, from the two volumes of Warburg's published writings [I.1-2], the Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlich Bibliothek Warburg [VII] to the just published, Austellungen [II.3], offer other avenues for interpreting and supplementing the Mnemosyne Atlas.] In addition to providing Warburg's draft Introduction to the Mnemosyne Atlas - a key if characteristically knotty fragmentary text - they also reproduce Fritz Saxl's illuminating letter to a prospective publisher regarding the Atlas, while Warnke's own Introduction provides important details about the Mnemosyne Atlas, its genesis, scope, and potential meanings.

We know, then, that Warburg's plan had been to complete at least 79 and perhaps as many as 200 panels. Typically, though, Warburg's vision was not fully realized. As we have it, the Atlas is frozen in a provisional state: panels appear without titles; individual images - there are 971 in all - were for the most part displayed without titles or other identifying information; and while some photographs are matted, most are not. Fortunately, though, in a notebook titled Überschriften: Synopsis of Plates [WIA, III.104.1], Warburg's colleague Gertrud Bing, following her mentor's lead, offers brief headings for each panel, furnishing thereby a kind of conceptual shorthand signposting main subjects and themes. For instance, the headings summarizing the astrological symbolism of panel 22 read: "Spanish-Arabic practice. (Alfonso). Manipulation. The cosmic system as dice table. Sorcery. Lithomancy." Such abbreviated, aphoristic indications of what and how we are to interpret resemble the headings of an encyclopedic entry - albeit an encyclopedia consisting entirely of pictures. Or, if you will, the photographs of the panels serve as a set of post-modern grisailles, a belated memory palace, which invites us to contemplate Warburg's syncretic vision of the afterlife of pagan symbolism and cosmography in medieval, Renaissance, and post-Renaissance art and thought.

This website presents ten of these photographed panels, selected to exemplify both the cosmographical and art-historical content of the Mnemosyne Atlas. Though offering but fragments of a fragment, it is designed to show some of the Wanderstrassen that Warburg pursued in the Atlas. The Warburg Institute has provided new, better scans of the surviving photographs - better, that is, than the images seen in the Gesammelte Schriften volume and other publications (to say nothing of other venues on the Web).

Furthermore, the ability to zoom in and out on the panels and on individual images permits a closer inspection of the material aspects of the Atlas. Alternately, if you click on individual images, a window providing identifying information will appear; frequently links to further iterations and permutations on the same image are also provided. Finally, under the tab "Guided Panels," the user will find interpretations of individual panels by myself and other scholars. Such meanderings, of course, are meant to be at best exemplary, but never exhaustive.
Christopher D. Johnson

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Begun in 1924 and left unfinished at the time of his death in 1929, the is Aby Warburg's attempt to map the "afterlife of antiquity," or how images of great symbolic, intellectual, and emotional power emerge in Western antiquity and then reappear and are reanimated in the art and cosmology of later times and places, from Alexandrian Greece to Weimar Germany.

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The Mnemosyne Atlas  is the greatest and most ambitious work of Warburg's life. It consists of a series of plates on different subjects, each with a variety of black and white images relating to the subject, mostly art historical and cosmographical images from various eras, but also many modern images from newspapers, magazines and maps.

By creating plates on which images are added and removed, Wahlberg examined the evolution of symbols from ancient times to the present. These images are not only visually and meaningfully linked, they also acquire a subjective importance and together outline patterns of historical evolution and changes in human emotion. The different plates are also numbered and named, and together they form a more ambitious picture of the study.

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After gaining an understanding of taxonomy and researching the relevant elements, I began to consider how I could organise my collection in other ways, as well as expanding the meaning of my images with the aid of text.  I needed to refer to different artists and look for similarities in my collection and research methods to devise three taxonomies, each of which included all of my elements. This was a process of further analysing and researching my collection.

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Alain de Botton's book Arts as therapy refers to the typology photography of the Bechers, who were the primary advocates of seeing the beauty of modern landscapes full of technological and industrial features. This inspired me to learn more about the historical development of typology photography.

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Bernd and Hilla Becher
Water Towers USA, 1988
Black and white photographs
Each 40 x 30 cm
Collection John Aniello
All photographs courtesy Bernd and Hilla Becher

Bernd and Hilla Becher
Gas-holders Germany, Belgium, France, Britain, USA, 1966-93
Each 40 x 30 cm
All photographs courtesy Bernd and Hilla Becher

Bernd and Hilla Becher
Blast furnace plant Duisburg-Bruckhausen, Ruhr, 1999
50 x 60 cm
Unpublished photograph
All photographs courtesy Bernd and Hilla Becher

Bernd and Hilla Becher
Winding towers Germany, Belgium, France, 1965-98
Each 40 x 30 cm
All photographs courtesy Bernd and Hilla Becher

There is some simplicity in which there is profound wisdom. Such is the art of Bernd and Hilla Becher. For more than 40 years they have been making pictures in a systematic and unerring manner. From the beginning, their work has been scorned by curators of photography for being 'inartistic'. It makes no difference to the Bechers; they have never looked to art photographers for inspiration.

Years later, and the Bechers have become the guiding light behind the so-called objective school of photography, and their students are achieving prominent positions which were previously unimaginable for photographers in the art world, but there is still much muttering of dissent from the photographic community. How can such matter-of-fact photography be art? The answer lies in one simple verb: look. For looking is the heart of the Bechers' work, and is the reason why they use photography as their medium, for one definition of photography is a long look.

Bernd Becher was born in 1931 in the Ruhr valley, into a family that worked in the region's steel and mining industries. His home town, Siegen, sprawled around a blast furnace and, from childhood onwards, he was fascinated with industrial structures.

In his youth, he found a photograph of an ironworks in a gazette of local businesses. Taken by a commercial photographer, and humbly reproduced on poor-quality paper, Grube Eisernhardter Tiefbau is the kind of picture that many people would find unremarkable. But for Bernd, this straightforward, workmanlike photograph of the foundry was wonderful. Some years later, by which time he had studied illustration at art college, Bernd returned to draw the ironworks but, before he could finish, the demolition of the site had begun. This was in 1957, a time when many of the foundries around Siegen were being decommissioned. In order to have a reference of the structure before it was gone, he took a series of photographs with a 35mm camera. His intention was to finish the drawings in his studio, but he found that the photographs offered a much more vivid depiction of the subject than he could achieve by hand.

Abandoning his drawing, Bernd tried to make a collage from the photographs, but he soon rejected this idea. Although the images were full of visual information about the structures, individually they held only a partial record. His next step was to splice the photographic prints together to make a composite picture. It was an advance on the collages, but it was still an imperfect solution.

Then he met Hilla Wobeser, his future wife. She not only shared his interest in the industrial landscape, but was also a technically accomplished photographer. They began a creative partnership that has taken them on a lifetime's journey across the industrialised world. Together, they have recorded a magnificent history of the fast-disappearing modern archaeology of the West's industrialisation. But they have contributed so much more - through their example and their work they have restored photography to its rightful place as great art. This is neither an idle boast about them, nor an exaggerated claim made purely for the merits of the medium. By using photography to look long and hard - neither minimising some appearances, nor maximising others - they have shown how a calm, clear and unconditional view of life is so very wonderful.

Hilla was born in Potsdam in 1934. Her mother had been a photographer and taught Hilla the basic skills. After leaving school, Hilla became the apprentice of Walter Eichgrun, whose family had been, for three generations, photographers to the Prussian court at Sans Souci. Deeply traditional, Eichgrun taught her the fundamental techniques of his conservative approach to photography. He practised what Hilla calls 'direct, descriptive photography... clear, clean images - with a complete tonal range, with appropriate depths - devoted to the subject'. This was the application of photography that Bernd sought for his pictures of industrial structures, one of the properties of the medium he had seen in the earlier picture of the ironworks.

Bernd and Hilla met at the Troost advertising agency in 1957, where he was working to support himself as a student at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. The next year, Hilla enrolled at the Academy to study photography. There was no photography course, but some of the teachers were interested, so Hilla was given responsibility for ordering the necessary equipment. Resources were scarce, but it gave the Bechers the means to use the appropriate camera and darkroom facilities.

They immediately moved up from a Rolleiflex to a plate camera. It was, in essence, the same equipment as Walter Eichgrun had used and, apart from a few innovative modifications, the same type of camera that the great landscape photographers of the 19th century had employed. Bernd and Hilla followed exactly the same approach, too. This was not in order to emphasise a tradition, or to reflect on the past; it was simply to use a camera to take the clearest pictures possible. This quality was largely discarded when art photographers thought that their pictures needed effects - soft focus, high contrast and so on - for the resulting image to be defined as art. It was a movement that produced decades of ridiculous photographs and almost succeeded in downgrading the simplest and the most studious use of a camera.

Just as the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) used a camera obscura to trace the lines of 'normal' perspective, so did the pioneering photographers of the 19th century discover, by eliminating optical distortions and capturing detail, how to create realistic photographs. Among the finest of these was the American Carleton Watkins (1829- 1916).

Watkins' first landscape commission - a photographic record of a quicksilver mine used as evidence to settle a land claim - required clarity and a sense of objectivity. It was a 'record photograph'. The detail Watkins achieved with his landscapes was fundamental to their marvel, but it was his sense of composition and wonder that elevated them to high art. However, none of this would have been possible had he not been able to create pictures that had no distortion and were brimming with information.

The photograph of the ironworks at Eisern that inspired Bernd was a record picture, too. Record photographers are the unsung heroes of the history of photography. They are the anonymous commercial photographers who were commissioned to record both great and everyday industrial and civic projects, from the construction of canals to the blooming of floral clocks. Most industries would maintain a photographic record of their operations, partly as a technical archive and partly for commemorative or promotional purposes.

When Bernd began photographing around Siegen, he came across the record-picture archives of a number of steelworks. These formed the photographic references for his work. While many would perceive this type of photograph as 19th-century in style, the Bechers, quite rightly, regarded it as a timeless and perfectly practical use of the medium. It also held a significant philosophical implication.

The Bechers' purpose has always been to make the clearest possible photographs of industrial structures. They are not interested in making euphemistic, socio-romantic pictures glorifying industry, nor doom-laden spectacles showing its costs and dangers. Equally, they have nothing in common with photographers who seek to make pleasing modernist abstractions, treating the structures as decorative shapes divorced from their function.

The Bechers' goal is to create photographs that are concentrated on the structures themselves and not qualified by subjective interpretations. To them, these structures are the 'architecture of engineers' and their pictures should be seen as the photography of engineers - that is, record pictures.

So, in 1959, the Bechers drove around the Ruhr in a van photographing blast furnaces, winding towers, gas tanks, cooling towers, water towers, lime kilns and framework houses. They would use ladders and scaffolding to achieve clear vantage points from which to make their pictures. Like technical drawings, these would feature front and side elevations.

At that time colour film was not a practical consideration; black-and-white was the only viable choice. Photographing on overcast days, when the effects of shadows are negligible, gives their pictures great clarity. The Bechers endeavour to use similar lighting conditions, so all of their prints have roughly the same range of black, grey and white tones. This allows the photographs to be compared with one another without extraneous differences - dramatic skies or deep shadows - distracting from the subject matter. It also means that each individual picture is as faithful and accurate a record of the structure as possible.

The Bechers are fascinated by the idiosyncratic appearance of each structure. The mass-produced, design-conscious assemblies devised by architects with an eye on appearance do not appeal as much as those with a mindfulness of function. What interests the Bechers are constructions made by engineers whose plans are pragmatic, where function dictates the form, rather than, as is increasingly the case, the other way round. In the words of Bernd: 'There is a form of architecture that consists in essence of apparatus, that has nothing to do with design, and nothing to do with architecture either. They are engineering constructions with their own aesthetic.'

Their fascination is rooted in an understanding of the structures. The Bechers are the first to acknowledge the primarily functional role of the constructions, that their existence is justified solely by their industrial performance, and that once this has been superseded the structures will be modified or demolished. They liken the way a blast furnace develops over time, as furnaces and pipework are added, to the organic but apparently chaotic growth of a medieval city. This purpose-led rationale is what attracts them. They refer to some of the structures as 'nomadic architecture'. Once they photographed a blast furnace that was being dismantled by Chinese workers in Luxembourg, who then had to reassemble it in China.

By placing photographs of similar subjects alongside each other, the individual differences emerge, making the fine details in each picture more noticeable, more distinct. Drawing on this, they began exhibiting the pictures as typologies; by the early 1960s they showed their work only in typological groups. Typically, a piece of work would comprise four small prints of, for example, water towers, adjacent to a larger print of one of the four. They would not supply prints of individual pictures; the typology was the work. Later, their typologies contained prints of equal size, measuring 30 cm by 40 cm. It could be three rows of five prints, a grid of nine or, in one case, 28 blast furnaces in three rows; a symphony of industrial structures.

The Bechers' pictures do not have to be viewed in typologies in order to make sense, as they have validity as individual images. The typology has been developed for two reasons. First, by amassing such a detailed survey of industrial structures they are revealing sets and subsets, much like 19th-century zoologists did. With water towers, for example, there are round steel ones with conical tops, like hats, and semi-circular ones. Others are circular with sloping roofs, or without roofs, or on steel derricks, or brick towers, and so on. The more fine the differences, the better they are illustrated by the typology.

Second, the typology used by the Bechers emphasises the rewards of close scrutiny, and it is this that makes each and every one of their pictures fascinating. By presenting 15 water towers in a grid, the first effect is an imposing mass of industrial structures. You must stand back in order to take them all in as a group, but to look closer at an individual picture it is necessary to draw nearer.

Up close, only one tower is visible at a time. Isolated in pristine, black-and-white definition, this everyday object is revealed as an 'anonymous sculpture', an unostentatious but fabulous creation by mankind. To compare it with the others is to stand back again, and from here the impulse is to step up and examine another. Just as the beauty of the individual structure (for that is what they are) is there to see, so together as a typology they are a thrilling spectacle.

Apart from presenting them as typologies, the Bechers produced a series of monographs covering a range of industrial structures. In these finely printed books, the pictures are published one to a page. They are like portraits and the devotional aspect of their work becomes apparent. Photography, like film, has two specific properties. The first is that the photograph will record far more than the eye could see at the time of exposure. It traps details so finely on the negative that it would take the naked eye a long time to uncover the same amount of information. As with a view from a window, one can look and look and look, always seeing more.

Secondly, and more subtly, a photograph reflects the way the photographer engages with the subject. Take a picture of something you hate and it shows. Likewise, take a picture of something you find wonderful, and a sense of this wonder will be apparent. This is the double-edged sword of photography - and the reason why it should be treated with respect. Much like a lie detector, if you try to make a photograph to deliberately solicit a certain response then the manipulation, however subtle, will be transparent.

There is a wisdom and honour in the Bechers' work which frees them from imposing a conditional reading upon the viewer. The wisdom is the methodology they recognise in the 'neutral' depiction of record photography. The honour stems from a principle about not imposing their ideas on other people.

Hilla and Bernd both grew up under Adolf Hitler. They saw how he corrupted German art to promote his propaganda. This was particularly pertinent to photography, and it remained tainted after the war; witness the grim examples of Leni Riefensthal's glorifying images of Nazis and the pseudo-scientific eugenic portrait studies that were published to defend anti-semitism and supremacism. This is why the legacy of August Sander (1876-1964), whose neutral approach to portraiture was damned by the Nazis, is so precious in Germany. It is also why the Bechers' continuing example is extremely important.

Between 1976 and 1996, Bernd was the professor of photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. During this period, his teachings inspired a generation of German artists who were part of the objective school, whose luminaries include Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Candida Hoffer, Thomas Ruff and Axel Hütte. All of their highly successful careers have been founded on work that faithfully follows the principles that the Bechers adopted.

Because photography has, for so long, been used for commercial reasons, notably in advertising, people are accustomed to absorbing manipulative images, and have come to expect - or even rely on - a conditional presentation. Take away this interpretative control and the viewer is left free, which is unnerving if one is not used to it. This is why some regard the Bechers' photographs as 'cold'. There is no editorial, no soundtrack, no suggestions nor judgments. You are left to your own devices.

Of course, their motivations are not invisible, nor their presence unfelt. What does it mean when something 'rings true'? How is it that one can sense the sincerity in another's words? Perhaps this lies in the realm of intuition, not explanation. To analyse art is not necessarily to experience it. Sometimes, by focusing on a deliberation of it, one limits the engagement to a cerebral encounter. In the West particularly, we use explanations to try to control the unknown, to make uncertainties certain. Maybe there is a wisdom we have that is not learnt but is within us. Far better to look rather than puzzle, and to open one's senses to what is there.

Here lies the wonder in the Bechers' photographs. They are like rounding a hill and seeing a view spread out before you. In Cwmcynon Colliery, Mountain Ash, South Wales, 1966, a minehead stands above lines of terraced houses in the village. The giant pair of wheels on top of the single-tier steel headframe is an engineer's structure. A device to do a job, not to win design awards. You could not dream up such structures, neither could you invent, say, your grandparents' kitchen. These things arise from the conditions in which they are used.

They are the lines on the face of the world. The photographs are portraits of our history. And when the structures have been demolished and grassed over, as though they were never there, the pictures remain.

Industrial Landscapes by Bernd and Hilla Becher is published this month by MIT Press and Schirmer/Mosel Verlag at 40. For further information on books by Bernd and Hilla Becher, visit www.schirmer-mosel.de. The Erasmus Prize, worth €210,000, is awarded annually for outstanding contribution to European culture and society. An exhibition of the Bechers' work to mark the award is at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam from 14 September to 1 December 2002.

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There is some simplicity in which there is profound wisdom. Such is the art of Bernd and Hilla Becher. For more than 40 years they have been making pictures in a systematic and unerring manner. From the beginning, their work has been scorned by curators of photography for being 'inartistic'.

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August Sander, “Antlitz der Zeit” (The Face of Our Time), 1910–29

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The Order of Things - Walther Collection

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Blossfeldt, Karl, Urformen der Kunst, 1928

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After researching the Bechers' typology photographs and the subsequent development of typology photography, I decided to categorise my collection according to material type and conduct an experiment in typology photography that encourages me to consider one particular way in which photography has been employed.

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"You are the Weather" by Roni Horn | An introduction

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Inspired by Roni Horn, I chose to classify the collection in a second way using the weather. I divided the collection into three categories, sunny, cloudy, and rainy, based on the date each photograph was taken and the weather conditions on the day it was taken.

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HENRI CARTIER BRESSON - The Decisive Moment 1973_2007

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Three Blind Men and An Elephant Productions

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The Decisive Moment: A Candid Conversation w/ Fondation Henrí Cartier-Bresson’s Director, Agnès Sire

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Henri Cartier-Bresson has intuitively chronicled decisive moments of human life around the world with poetic documentary style. His photographs impart spontaneous instances with meaning, mystery, and humor in terms of precise visual organization, and his work, although tremendously difficult to imitate, has influenced many other photographers. His photographs may be summed up through a phrase of his own: "the decisive moment," the magical instant when the world falls into apparent order and meaning, and may be apprehended by a gifted photographer.
Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup, and studied literature at Cambridge University in 1928-29. He began photographing in 1931 and purchased a Leica in 1933. He joined an ethnographic expedition to Mexico the next year, and in 1935 studied cinematography with Paul Strand. He assisted Jean Renoir in 1936 and 1939, and made his own documentary, Return to Life, in 1937. He was drafted into the film and photo unit of the French army in 1940 and was taken prisoner by the Germans that same year. After three years of imprisonment he escaped and began working for the French underground. In 1943 he made series of portraits of artists, including Matisse, Bonnard, and Braque. Through 1944 and 1945, Cartier-Bresson photographed the occupation of France and its liberation. In 1947 he co-founded the Magnum agency with Robert Capa, Chim (David Seymour), and George Rodger and he spent the next twenty years traveling around the world. He received the Overseas Press Club Award four times; the American Society of Magazine Photographers award in 1953; and the Prix de la Société Française de Photographie in 1959, among other honors. In 1966 he left Magnum, which remained his agent, and devoted himself to drawing. Cartier-Bresson's extensive publications include From One China to Another (1954), The Europeans and People of Moscow (1955), The Face of Asia (1972), and The Decisive Moment (1973).
Lisa Soccio
Handy et al. Reflections in a Glass Eye: Works from the International Center of Photography Collection, New York: Bulfinch Press in association with the International Center of Photography, 1999, p. 211.

Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibitions at ICP
For more information visit the Fondation Cartier-Bresson.
For reproduction rights, contact

Magnum Photos

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Henri Cartier-Bresson has intuitively chronicled decisive moments of human life around the world with poetic documentary style. His photographs impart spontaneous instances with meaning, mystery, and humor in terms of precise visual organization, and his work, although tremendously difficult to imitate, has influenced many other photographers.

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Finishing a series of research, I decided to divide the photographs into three main categories according to the purpose of the shoot: Randomly discovering and photographing, Consciously observing and recording, and Exploring emotional connections. These three categories f ormed the hierarchy of priorities. In this process, I investigated each collection one more time, exploring what they meant to me and whether they all met the criteria for a decisive moment.

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During the Tate Modern trip, I was impressed by a work of art that seemed simple and easy to understand. It is a work called Remember Nature by the artist Gustav Metzger.