A deep dive into the pioneering collection of nineteenth-century French photographs, equipment, and ephemera, which is a cornerstone of the George Eastman Museum In the early twentieth century, Parisian photographer, amateur historian, and collector Gabriel Cromer (1873-1934) amassed a collection that traced photography's prehistory, invention, and development to about 1890. His dream was to found a national museum of the photographic arts in France. Although Cromer's ambition was never realized, his collection was central to establishing the world's first museum dedicated to photography: the George Eastman Museum. The Cromer Collection of Nineteenth-Century French Photography considers the origin and circulation of the collection as well as the influence it has had on photography as a field of study. The book's six essays, written by French and American scholars, explore the Cromer Collection's complex passage across markets, borders, and functions. For more than half a century, curators and scholars worldwide have drawn extensively on the Gabriel Cromer Collection for exhibitions and publications; this book provides the first focused scholarly study of the foundational resource. Published in association with the George Eastman Museum

Henri Cartier-Bresson was 'the eye of the 20th century' and one of the world's most acclaimed photographers. Paris was his home, on and off, for most of his life (1908-2004). The photographs he took of the city and its people manage to be both dreamlike and free of affectation. Here are around 160 photographs taken over a more than fifty-year career. Mostly in black and white, this selection reveals the strong influence on Cartier-Bresson of pioneering documentary photographer Eugene Atget (1857-1927), and the clear visual links with Surrealism that infused Cartier-Bresson's early pictures. After an apprenticeship with Cubist painter Andre Lhote, in 1932 Cartier-Bresson bought his first Leica, a small portable camera that allowed him to capture movement and the rhythms of daily life in Paris. Cartier-Bresson observed from close quarters the Liberation in August 1944 and the civil disturbances of May 1968. In between he also succeeded in capturing the faces of Parisians in their natural habitat, celebrated artists and writers and citizens alike. Ever-attentive to different ways of portraying the city around him, Cartier-Bresson returned to drawing during the last two decades of his life. This collection is not only a superb portrait of Paris in the 20th century, it is testament to Cartier-Bresson's skill as a supreme observer of human life. With 200 illustrations

Pablo Picasso always maintained a complex and intense relationship with photography and with the photographers in his milieu, something that could be seen when he pretended to be a reporter one summer, when he used his image as an icon, or when he took inspired and playful self-portraits. This book, which is also the catalogue of the exhibition of the same name at the Museu Picasso of Barcelona, immerses the reader in the universe of Picasso through photography and brings together images that explore all the facets of a creator who is simultaneously the author, model, witness and viewer of his work and life.