Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation

The Foundation's mission is to preserve the archives of Henri Cartier-Bresson^[4] and Martine Franck, and show their work and the work of others.^[5][6] It also exists to help researchers and curators to work with those archives.^[5]

The Foundation hosts four solo exhibitions per year by a variety of photographers, painters, sculptors, and illustrators.^[5]

The inaugural exhibition at the Rue des Archives venue, in November 2018, was Martine Franck – A Retrospective, which then toured to Musée de l'Élysée in Switzerland, and Fotomuseum Antwerp in Belgium.^{[7][8][9][10]}

Cartier-Bresson and Franck's archives consist of over 50,000 prints and 200,000 negatives,^[11] as well as all kinds of documents.^[12] Prior to 2018, the archives were scattered over four sites,^[13] but since then they have all been housed in the new building.^[11]

The Foundation was set up by Cartier-Bresson, Franck and Mélanie Cartier-Bresson.^[4] Cartier-Bresson gave his personal collection of his photographs to the Foundation.^[4] It opened in 2003 in a renovated 19th-century building at 2 Impasse Lebouis in the Montparnasse district of Paris.^[2][4] Between 2003 and 2018 it had 100,000 visitors a year.^[6]

In November 2018 it moved to 79 Rue des Archives, in the Marais district of Paris;^[6][14] a tall, narrow atelier in a 1913 building.^[15] The new building has significantly more exhibition and archive space than the previous, allowing for four exhibitions a year instead of three.^[2]

The non-profit Foundation is privately funded.^[5] A proportion of funds come from an endowment left by Franck, who died in 2012.^[2]

From 2003 Agnès Sire was its director.^[16] In November 2017 Sire became artistic director and François Hébel was appointed as director.^[2][16][17]

The Foundation issues the HCB Award.^[5][18]

• List of museums devoted to one photographer