Veteran French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who has died at the age of 95, was universally hailed as one of the most influential image-makers of the last century.
Born in August 1908 to a bourgeois family in a small town east of Paris, Cartier-Bresson took up photography in the 1930s after first studying painting.
After World War II, he co-founded the Magnum photo agency, and his pictures now hang in art galleries all over the world.
Shooting only black-and-white film, shunning artificial light and refusing to crop his pictures, he is seen by critics as one of the generation of photographers responsible for elevating what had been a hobby or a profession into a fully-fledged art form. His personal contribution was to combine the notion of the "Decisive Moment" - the name he gave to a major collection of his work in 1952 - with the meticulous eye for design and proportion that he learned from his studies with painter Andre Lhote in the 1920s.
The "Decisive Moment," he said in an oft-quoted line, "is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organisation of forms, which give that event its proper expression."
A student of the Surrealists, a movement at its height in the Paris of the 1920s, Cartier-Bresson shared their view of the unpredictability of significance.
With the unobtrusive and fast-shooting cameras that became available from the 1930s, he was permanently on the look-out for arresting images, blazing the trail for generations of photojournalists to come.
Rebellious by nature, Cartier-Bresson left his studies in 1931 for colonial Africa where he spent a year as a hunter and took his first photographs, few of which have survived.