Farewell to the Masters: A Photo Gallery: Six Who Saw

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HENRI

CARTIER-BRESSON

"Photojournalist" is too confining a term. Even "photographer" will not quite do it. Cartier-Bresson was simply a major artist of the 20th century. Whenever the world unfolded in some uncanny arrangement, as it did in Madrid, 1933, left, he was at the ready. He was unafraid of the most ordinary moments of life-- as in Sunday on the Banks of the River Marne, 1938, above--which he approached with wit and warmth

CARL MYDANS

Mydans was one of that fortunate crew, the original team of LIFE photographers who brought the world every week within the covers of a magazine. As the situation demanded, his pictures could be concise, moving, urgent or ingenious. And sometimes, as with his famous shot of General MacArthur wading ashore on Luzon in the Philippines in 1945, an icon of its era

EDDIE ADAMS

It was an image that summed up the moral chaos of the Vietnam War: Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan abruptly executing a captured Viet Cong. Although Adams said later that he believed Loan's claim that the man he killed had just murdered one of Loan's closest aides and his family, the picture became a turning point in American attitudes toward a brutal, perplexing war

HELMUT NEWTON

Before Newton, fashion spreads had sex, but they didn't have lust. They didn't have women wearing saddles or wrestling with men or reconnoitering one another, as they do while sharing a light in the 1979 photo at right. Newton's cunning pictures brought the tropes of European decadence into the wider world. Nothing has been quite the same since

GEORGE SILK

Among LIFE photographers, Silk was the motion man, the one who repeatedly devised ways to make pictures that snared action on the wing. He managed to put a camera on a ski and another on a surfboard. He adapted the racetrack photo-finish camera to catch track stars in motion. And for a photo essay on a 14-year-old diving star, he caught her at the very moment she broke the surface

RICHARD AVEDON

He was really two great photographers. One was the urbane fashionista whose pictures, like Dovima with Elephants, had a new kind of airborne energy and wit. The other was the unsparing portraitist, whose pictures, like Ronald Fischer, Beekeeper, Davis, California, May 9, 1981, said life is an acute condition