Here and Now

Here and Now accompanied the 2014 Henri Cartier-Bresson retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, one of the largest surveys of his work ever mounted. Clément Chéroux, then a curator at the Pompidou and now director of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, edited the book.

Thames & Hudson and the Centre Pompidou co-published the 392-page hardcover in 2014, timed to the exhibition's February-to-June run. Chéroux built the book around the full arc of Cartier-Bresson's career: the surrealist-influenced photographs of the late 1920s and early 1930s, his reportage for Magnum Photos across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, and his late return to drawing. Rare and previously unpublished photographs, including early color work, appear alongside his best-known pictures.

Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) cofounded Magnum Photos in 1947 and spent the following decades photographing revolutions, wars and everyday life on five continents, building the body of work that gave photojournalism its idea of the "decisive moment." Here and Now sits alongside the library's copy of The Modern Century, the catalogue for MoMA's 2010 Cartier-Bresson retrospective, as a second full-career survey built from a different institution's archive.