The Modern Century

The Modern Century is the catalogue for MoMA's 2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson retrospective, the first major American survey of his work in three decades. Peter Galassi, MoMA's chief curator of photography, organized the show and wrote the book.

The exhibition ran at MoMA from April to June 2010 and later traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Galassi's 376-page volume gathers roughly 300 photographs across twelve chapters, moving from Cartier-Bresson's 1920s surrealist-inflected beginnings through his decades as a photojournalist and cofounder of Magnum Photos. Galassi drew on the archives of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson to trace how the photographer's eye for structure and his instinct for the passing moment shaped a body of work that helped define twentieth-century photojournalism.

Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) coined the idea of the "decisive moment," the instant when a scene's form and meaning align in a single frame. He photographed across five continents over six decades, covering wars, decolonization and the daily texture of postwar Europe, and his influence runs through nearly every strand of documentary and street photography since.