Description

In the early 1970s, at the request of his longtime friends and collectors, Henri Cartier-Bresson reviews the thousands of prints in his archive. The idea is to choose the most important and significant works of his career.

He selects 385 photographs which, between 1972 and 1973, he prints in his trusted Parisian workshop, in 30×40 format and in 5 copies each.

Since then, the so-called Master Collection has never been published in its entirety.
On this extraordinary occasion, with “Henri Cartier-Bresson Le Grand Jeu” by M. Humery, by Marsilio, it is proposed in its entirety.

At the same time, the curator Matthieu Humery has brought together: the photographer Annie Leibovitz, the film director Wim Wenders, the writer Javier Cercas, the curator and director of the Prints and Photographs Department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Sylvie Aubenas, and the collector François Pinault, and has invited them to choose in turn about fifty images each, sharing their personal vision of photography and their interpretation of the work of this great master.

The challenge of the Le Grand Jeu exhibition project is to renew and enrich our view of Henri Cartier-Bresson, through that of five different and exceptional personalities. This unrepeatable catalog is composed of two parts: one illustrating the personal choice of each of the curators with an unpublished text; the other presenting the Master collection in its entirety, as conceived by Cartier-Bresson.