In 1932, a young photographer named Ansel Adams sought to lay down the law: “the artist must have a clear and complete conception of the final effects of the print before he operates the shutter of his lens’’ (Adams’s italics).
That same year, a slightly younger photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, took what may be the emblematic photograph of his career, if it isn’t too absurd to reduce a career as fecund and dazzling to a single image. In doing so, he took the law into his own hands.
