Tête à Tête
by Henri Cartier-Bresson

"Cartier-Bresson's portraits...will retain that spark of life that only a master was able to impart to the photographic portrait." --E.H. Gombrich


Over the last half century Henri Cartier-Bresson has photographed some of the most famous icons of the 20th century, those few people amongst millions whose images pass into history. Tête à Tête is a remarkable arrangement of Cartier-Bresson's most memorable portraits, including Pablo Picasso, Truman Capote, Marilyn Monroe, Lucian Freud, William Faulkner, Robert Kennedy, Che Guevara, Martin Luther King, Coco Chanel, and the Dalai Lama. Beyond these famous names there are also anonymous portraits, chosen for their striking and unusual features and a selection of pencil drawings, including a self-portrait among them. Henri Cartier-Bresson has himself supervised the design of the book and juxtaposition of all the photographs producing a distinguished collection of his work, diverse in its range of extraordinary and ordinary personalities from the 1930s to the 1990s. Images echo each other; on facing pages there may be an affinity of composition, of pose or gesture, or of facial expression. Tête à Tête reveals Cartier-Bresson as a photographer who is as skillful in recording the subtleties of the individual portrait as he is renowned for his masterful ability to capture the "decisive moment".

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