Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) was perhaps the finest and most influential image maker of the twentieth century, and his portraits are among his best-known work. Over a fifty-year period, he photographed some of the most eminent personalities of the era, as well as ordinary people, chosen as subjects because of their striking and unusual features.<br /><br />Originally published to coincide with an exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, this book features both well-known images and previously unpublished portraits: Ezra Pound, André Breton, Martin Luther King, Samuel Beckett, Truman Capote, Susan Sontag, Carl Jung, William Faulkner, Marilyn Monroe, Henri Matisse, and many more.<br /><br />Each photograph was chosen because it perfectly embodies Cartier-Bresson's description of what he was attempting to communicate in his work: “Above all I look for an inner silence. I seek to translate the personality and not an expression.” The portraits reproduced here--discreet, without artifice--confirm once more the singular gift of Cartier-Bresson, who instinctively knew in which revealing fraction of a second to click the shutter.