More than two centuries ago, Britain’s Industrial Revolution marked one of many beginnings of modernity. Born when the automobile and the airplane were still in their infancy, Cartier-Bresson never lost his affection for old traditions, yet he did not shrink from change. For him modernity arrived in the 1950s, with the triumph of consumption and leisure, and his later pictures fluently describe its vulgar depredations, messy accumulations, and sprawling hedonism.
