El Siglo Moderno offers more than 300 photographs, some of them unknown even to specialists, by Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004), one of the most influential figures in the history of photography. Born into a prosperous Parisian family, by his early twenties his creativity was already taking part in the artistic identity of modern photography. After the Second World War, his extraordinary talent for stealing eternal images from a world in constant movement made him one of the leading figures of photojournalism, a field very different from his own. In 1947 Cartier-Bresson took part in founding the Magnum Photos agency and over the following ten years created extraordinary photographic series on the independence of India and Indonesia, revolutionary China, the Soviet Union after Stalin's death, the post-war boom in the United States and the confrontations of European cultures and their social and cultural tears. Peter Galassi, the author of this book, is chief curator of the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art.