Córdoba, Spain

A defining figure of photographic modernism, Henri Cartier-Bresson used a handheld camera to snatch beguiling images from fleeting moments of everyday life. In his 1952 book, The Decisive Moment, he explained, “I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to ‘trap’ life—to preserve life in the act of living.” Cartier-Bresson was connected to Surrealist circles in Paris in the 1930s, and his early photographs reinvent street life as Surrealist theater—more surprising and mysterious than the world we know. In Córdoba, Spain, he chanced upon a woman in front of a corset advertisement. In a rhyming juxtaposition, the older woman mimics the thinner, younger figure on the wall with an unconscious gesturing of her hands and a squint into the sunlight that echoes the blocked-out eyes of the painted woman: a collage of art and everyday life.