Henri Cartier-Bresson's status as a photographic pioneer and iconic cultural figure of the twentieth century is rarely disputed. The quality and extent of his work, ranging from iconic shots of his native Paris to the entire world, give ample evidence to corroborate the claims made for his genius. Of the pivotal events of this post-war period, there seem to be few which he did not witness, armed with his characteristic Leica camera and sustained by his ethos of ‘the decisive moment’.

Claude Cookman argues that even though in later years Cartier-Bresson himself cultivated his image as that of a Surrealist artist, this is a misleading interpretation of his post-war work. Likewise, the axiom that the value of Cartier- Bresson's oeuvre is its artistic expression of the human condition misses something essential about his vision. Cookman demonstrates that Cartier-Bresson's work from the 1940s to the 1960s was motivated by a desire and a sense of duty to witness and communicate world events. His social realism derived in large part from his political formation in the Europe of the 1930s and his concomitant leftist adherence to social justice and rebellion.

In the post-war period, Cartier-Bresson's work was commonly thought of solely as an artistic representation of a generic human condition. An examination of the press reaction to the exhibition of his work at the Louvre in 1955 identifies just such a recurring trope of abstract or bloodless universalism. This response to the exhibition, which displayed his work from both the European and non-European worlds, is then examined as betraying various underlying Eurocentric notions or presuppositions about Europe. These in turn manifested themselves further in the absence of any reference to pictures in the exhibition which were particularly propitious for reflecting on the meaning of Europe.

A step is then taken back to examine two of Cartier-Bresson's book collections: D'une Chine à l'autre (1954) and Les Européens (1955). Contrary to the kind of lofty, unmediated universalism attributed to him in the press on the Louvre exhibition, it is argued that these works were informed by a particular post-war European perspective. Each book, in different ways, represents various aspects of Europe or Europeanness which are not incompatible with universalism.