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Born first of 5 children
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Influenced by his father, uncle, and grandfather, he loved art and literature.
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He dropped out of highschool.
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In 1927–28 he studied in Paris with André Lhote, an artist and critic associated with the Cubist movement. Lhote implanted in him a lifelong interest in painting, a crucial factor in the education of his vision.
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Henri traveled to ivory coast searching for an adventure.
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After seeing the work of two major 20th-century photographers, Eugène Atget and Man Ray, he traveled to Africa in, where he lived in the bush, recorded his experiences with a miniature camera. There he contracted blackwater fever and was forced to return to France.
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In 1940, during World War II, Cartier-Bresson was taken prisoner by the Germans. He escaped in 1943 and participated in a French underground photographic unit to record the German occupation and retreat.
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In 1945 he made a film for the U.S. Office of War Information, Le Retour, which dealt with the return to France of released prisoners of war and deportees.
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In 1947, a one-man exhibition was held in that city’s Museum of Modern Art. In that same year, Cartier-Bresson, in partnership with the U.S. photographer Robert Capa and others, founded the cooperative photo agency known as Magnum Photos. The organization offered periodicals global coverage by some of the most talented photojournalists of the time. Under the aegis of Magnum, Cartier-Bresson concentrated more than ever on reportage photography.
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He was singularly honoured by his own country in 1955, when a retrospective exhibition of 400 of his photographs was held at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris and was then displayed in Europe, the United States, and Japan before the photographs were finally deposited in the Bibliothèque Nationale (National Library) in Paris.
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In the late 1960s Cartier-Bresson began to concentrate on making motion pictures—including Impressions of California (1969) and Southern Exposures (1971). He believed that still photography and its use in pictorial magazines was, to a large extent, being superseded by television.
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He died on August 3, 2004 (aged 95) in France