Many of Cartier-Bresson’s pictures lovingly describe age-old patterns of life, untouched by modern industry and commerce. This extended section of the exhibition explores that theme in Asia and throughout Europe and the West, particularly in the photographer’s native France.

Except as a prisoner of war, Cartier-Bresson never endured the hard physical labor that was unavoidable in the ancient societies he so much admired, and after a youthful adventure in Africa, he never again photographed in his own country’s colonies. But his keen attention to particulars redeems the strain of romantic nostalgia in his work, and his vision of premodern societies anchors a historical panorama that reaches well into our era of contraptions and consumerism.

Cartier-Bresson photographed more extensively in the United States than in any other country except his native France, but his American pictures are among his least well known. In principle, the clarity and balance of his postwar style went hand in hand with a posture of neutral observation. But his images of the United States incorporate a distinctly critical thread, alert to American vulgarity, greed, and racism.

Cartier-Bresson was the first Western photographer to be admitted to the Soviet Union after the death of Joseph Stalin, in 1953. The pictures he made in the summer of 1954 were themselves news and became extensively reproduced. When Cartier-Bresson returned nearly two decades later, in 1972 and 1973, his images of Soviet life developed a new dimension, becoming grim, barren, and bleak.

_{Henri Cartier-Bresson. Sumatra, Indonesia, 1950. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Lee Friedlander. © 2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson /Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson.}