Legendary photographer Cartier-Bresson dies

Legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who travelled the world for more than a half century capturing human drama with his camera, has died, French media reported today. He was 95.

Cartier-Bresson shot for Life, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and his work inspired generations of photographers. Cartier-Bresson became a French national treasure, though he was famously averse to having his own picture taken or to giving interviews.

Calls to the Cartier-Bresson home in Paris were not answered. His French publisher Gallimard and Magnum Photos, the agency he founded, said they could not confirm his death.

While most of his international fame was generated from worldwide exhibitions and publications, Cartier-Bresson gained recognition from two documentary films he made about medical aid to the loyalists in the Spanish Civil War and about French prisoners of war returning home at the end of the Second World War.

Cartier-Bresson was born on August 22, 1908, in Chanteloup outside Paris to a wealthy textile family.

The eldest of three children, he was interested mainly in painting. At 20, he turned his back on the lucrative family business to study art with Cubist painter André Lhote.