Henri Cartier-Bresson

Born in France in 1908, Cartier-Bresson trained first as a painter before picking up the small camera that would redefine photojournalism. He called it the decisive moment — the fraction of a second when form and meaning aligned — and spent decades chasing it across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. In 1947 he co-founded Magnum Photos, the cooperative that made photographers authors rather than hired hands. By the 1970s he set the camera down and returned to painting, the discipline he'd left behind forty years earlier. He died in 2004.