Decisive moments – Henri Cartier-Bresson: India in Full Frame

A train packed with Muslim refugees travelling from Delhi to Lahore in Pakistan is photographed at Kuinkshaha, North India, in 1947. Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos

At Birla House, Delhi, in 1948, Mahatma Gandhi dictates a message before breaking his fast. This was one of the last images of the Indian leader before his assassination on January 30. Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos

Crowds gather between Birla House and the cremation grounds on the Jumna River, throwing flowers in the path of Mahatma Gandhi’s funeral cortege. Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos

“There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment, and the masterpiece of good ruling is to know and seize this moment.”

So wrote Jean-François-Paul de Gondi, the French priest whose memoirs, written while the cleric was serving as the cardinal de Retz, are now considered a masterpiece of French 17th century literature.

Despite the quality of his writing however, it’s not the cardinal we have to thank for our contemporary understanding of “decisive moment” as a phrase.

That honour falls to another cultured Frenchman, the photographer, filmmaker and painter, Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004), a man credited with largely inventing modern photojournalism and street photography as we now understand them.

Not only did the words serve as the title of Cartier-Bresson's first book, published as The Decisive Moment in the United States in 1952, but they also became synonymous with Cartier-Bresson's photographic philosophy and reportage-style aesthetic, both of which are now being celebrated in Henri Cartier-Bresson: India in Full Frame, a new exhibition at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York.

The show starts in 1947, a year that was to prove a decisive moment for the subcontinent and for the photographer’s career alike, with pictures of an astrologer’s shop in the mill workers’ quarter of Mumbai and Muslim refugees fleeing the violence of partition aboard a train headed for the nascent Pakistan.

Not only was 1947 the year of Indian independence, the founding of Pakistan and the disastrous violence of partition, but it was also the year in which Cartier-Bresson had a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, established the Magnum agency with his friends and colleagues Robert Capa and David ‘Chim’ Seymour, and visited India for the first time.

In January the following year, Cartier-Bresson took the photographs of Mahatma Gandhi's final hours and the events following his assassination, the publication of which in Life magazine brought the photographer's work to a wider audience and international attention.

As well as featuring 69 images selected by the photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson: India in Full Frame also includes his camera, some letters and other personal ephemera, alongside some of the magazines that published and helped to popularise his work.

In his own curation of the images that went into The Decisive Moment, the book whose French title translates as Images on the Run (Images à la Sauvette), Cartier-Bresson divided his work up to 1952 into two sections, the first of which, consisting mainly of photographs taken in the West, covered the period from 1932 to 1947, while the second, which starts in 1947, is dominated by the photographer's reportage from the East, whose focus was increasingly political rather than aesthetic.

One of the many separate but interconnected exhibitions that will form part of Magnum's ongoing celebration of its 70th anniversary this year – another is scheduled to be shown at the MoMA in June – Henri Cartier-Bresson: India in Full Frame captures a decisive moment in Cartier-Bresson's career and in history, when photojournalists and magazines still had the power to define how we see and understand other cultures and globally-significant events.

• Henri Cartier-Bresson: India in Full Frame is being shown at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York until September 4 (rubinmuseum.org).

Nick Leech is a feature writer at The National.