Peregrinations, Europe, 1930-1933, the exhibition at the Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris

After displaying a selection of pictures by photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) taken in France between 1926 and 1938, the Cartier-Bresson Foundation turns toward his many travels throughout Europe. It especially focuses on four years of creation – between 1930 and 1933. The photographer is then very young (he’s is his twenties) and discovers the world with a playful and curious eye.

Surrealist writer André Pieyre de Mandiargues (1909-1991) faithfully followed him through his peregrinations and says about him: “All along our road trips throughout Europe or our wanderings in Paris, I saw the greatest photographer of the modern times coming to life thanks to a sort of spontaneous activity, a kind of game at first, that finally imposed itself to this young painter like other young people impose poetry. Not for the purpose of making it the object of an advantageous career, because for the two petit-bourgeois barely out of their teens and hardly saved from the “good society” rules we were he and I, the words of career and even job were only highly sickening!”

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Here, we can attend the birth of an artist in a period of time when euphoria rules everywhere in Europe. A humanist who multiplies portraits of unknown persons and most of all, a wonderful picture composer whose photographs can be enjoyed like poems.

Picture: Trieste, Italy, 1933 © Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation / Magnum Photos