The Decisive Moment

The Decisive Moment is Steidl's 2014 facsimile of Henri Cartier-Bresson's 1952 book of early photographs, first titled Images à la Sauvette.

Simon and Schuster in New York published the original with Editions Verve in Paris, and it carried a collage cover by Henri Matisse. Steidl's edition reproduces that book as a 160-page English-language facsimile, clothbound in a slipcase, and adds a separate booklet with an essay on the book's history by Clément Chéroux, a curator at the Centre Pompidou.

Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) was born in Chanteloup, Seine-et-Marne, and studied painting with André Lhote in 1926, the year he took his first photographs. In 1931 he saw a photograph by Martin Munkácsi and decided to concentrate on photography, and in 1936 he was second assistant to Jean Renoir. In 1947 the Museum of Modern Art in New York gave him an exhibition, and he founded the Magnum Photos cooperative with Robert Capa, David Seymour, William Vandivert and George Rodger. From 1948 to 1950 he spent three years in the Far East.