Cartier-Bresson

The project was anchored by Turner-Seed’s groundbreaking interviews with the world’s best living photographers at the time, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Cecil Beaton, Lisette Model and Gordon Parks.

Of the impulse to take a photo, to grab the moment, we hear Cartier-Bresson excitedly tell Turner-Seed, “Life is once, forever.”

“I remember when we sold a Cartier-Bresson for $350 — it was a big celebration,” recalls David Fahey, who worked with Hawkins for a decade before creating his own Fahey/Klein Gallery in 1986.

In the following decades, they purchased artwork at galleries and auction houses in New York, California, Chicago and Europe, scooping up paintings by famed and historic artists like Titian and Jan Lievens as well as 20th-century photos by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Irving Penn and Andy Warhol, plus contemporary art by living painters like Amy Sherald, Cecily Brown, Tomma Abts and Rashid Johnson.

In its first year, along with to-be-expected exhibitions of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s reportage in the Soviet Union, portraits of Chicago workers attributed to Lewis W. Hine, and W. Eugene Smith’s pictures of mercury-poisoning victims in Minamata, Japan, the ICP mounted an early show of holography and a survey of color Polaroids.