France: Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the great photographers of the 20th century and a founding father of modern photojournalism, has died aged 95, family friends said yesterday.
A founder of the Magnum picture agency in 1947 who admirers dubbed "the eye of the century", Cartier-Bresson died in the south of France on Monday, the LCI television channel said.
The website of newspaper Liberation said the photographer, an intensely private man, was buried yesterday in a quiet family ceremony at Monjustin, in the Provence region.
"He was the greatest. What he saw was extraordinary," said Goksin Sipahioglu, founder of Sipa Press photo agency. "He was a great and humble man."
Cartier-Bresson made his name partly by being in the right place at the right time, a knack that enabled him to develop his talent for capturing in his trade-mark black-and-white photographs what he called the "decisive moment".
During a career in which he travelled to more than 20 countries, Cartier-Bresson documented some of the most powerful moments and figures of the last century.
From the Spanish civil war to the liberation of Paris during the second World War, and from the death of Mahatma Gandhi to the surrender of Beijing to Mao Zedong's forces in 1949, or to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In 1954, the Frenchman also became the first Western photographer allowed into the Soviet Union after the death of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin the previous year.
Cartier-Bresson's most striking photographs, such as the French boy proudly carrying two huge bottles with a little girl giggling behind him or the rotund man caught in mid-leap across a Paris puddle, illustrate the superb design, insight and gentle good humour characteristic of his work.
One of his most famous photographs, the 1938 Picnic on the Banks of the Marne, shows a working-class family enjoying a picnic, innocently unaware of the camera's presence.
"In photography, you've got to be quick, quick, quick, quick, like an animal and a prey," Cartier-Bresson said in a rare filmed interview accompanying a 1979 exhibition of his works.
"And you have to try to put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt."
As a young man, Cartier-Bresson wanted to become a painter and studied in Paris with Cubist Andre Lohte and Jacques Emile Blanche, continuing to draw throughout his life.
The son of a rich industrialist, Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup, near Paris, on August 22nd, 1908. He began taking pictures with a simple box camera in the 1930s.
In the second World War, he spent three years in a German prison camp. He escaped twice, was caught, and then escaped again. He joined the French resistance and helped others to escape.
Cartier-Bresson quit Magnum in 1966, but continued to take photographs. (Reuters)