by Martin Parr | Henri Cartier-Bresson
The English (Les Anglais)
2022
$82.00
First edition of The English (Les Anglais) by Martin Parr and Henri Cartier-Bresson (2022)
First impression
Medium format hardback in new condition
Signed by Martin Parr to title page
Comes with a dust jacket
50 black and white photographs (Henri Cartier-Bresson)
50 colour photographs (Martin Parr)
Text by François Hébel
About
In 1962, Henri-Cartier Bresson accepted a commission from British television ITV/ABC to make a documentary on the north of England. Broadcast only once and unearthed by the Cinémathèque Française last year, it was made from still photographs. We discover previously unknown photographs, that make an amusing portrait of English people at work and at leisure.
In 1989, Martin Parr, a photographer already recognised for his controversial colour photographs of the British “middle class”, applied for membership in the Magnum Photos cooperative agency. At the time, Henri Cartier-Bresson, co-founder of the agency, strongly opposed it. A meeting between the two photographers finally allowed a personal “reconciliation” as well as the coexistence within the agency of their diametrically opposed conceptions of photography. Martin Parr finally joined the agency in 1994 and even served as President (2013-2017).
The interest of this book is to qualify these divergences of point of view which, according to Henri Cartier-Bresson, belong to “two different solar systems”. The previously unknown photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson to be discovered there resonate in a disturbing way with those made by Martin Parr, more than 20 years apart in the same region of northern England.
