The legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Br esson was a Frenchman of his century who trained his lens on the world, says his biographer, Pierr e Assouline

The listening eye

I first met Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1994. I was wearing my journalist’s rather than my author’s hat when I knocked at his studio door near the Place des Victoires in Paris, where he liked to hide away when he was drawing. He had at last agreed to be interviewed, on one condition: that it shouldn’t be an interview. Having already taken on board his taste for the paradoxical, I had decided to approach the meeting in terms of a conversation. But if he had simply offered me a cup of tea, I would still have been unable to resist, so great was my admiration and so deep-rooted my fascination for the man and for his work.

It was an unforgettable first meeting. We spent more than five hours chatting, wandering through his memories with no particular guidelines other than instinct and random association. Nothing could have created a clearer historical perspective than this journey through time and, when I left, I felt overwhelmed by the images of the chaotic era that he had experienced day by day, living through history.

We had evoked all aspects of the 20th century – among them the men who had fashioned it and all the places that symbolised it. But it was not so much events that we conjured up, as moments along the way, as if the destination were somehow less important than the road to it. He gave me no dates, above all, summoning up only impressions and shapes

Opposite: Boulevard Diderot, Paris, 1969.

This page, clockwise from top: Harper’s Bazaar staff Richard Avedon (left),

Carmel Snow (centre) and Marie-Louise Bousquet (right), at a

fashion show in Paris, c.1947; Dubrovnik, Croatia, 1965; Var,

France, 1932

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that were drawn with extraordinary vividness but, just when I least expected it, he would describe something with absolute precision.

As the day drew to a close the light grew weaker and weaker, although it never occurred to him to turn on the lamp. It didn’t matter. While he was preparing tea, I looked around. His furniture was simple and sparse, although his library was bursting with art books and exhibition catalogues, the bindings worn with too much fingering. On the wall, under glass but unframed, were drawings by his father, gouaches by his uncle, and two photographs, not his: one by the Hungarian Martin Munkácsi, taken in about 1929, of three black boys,

seen from the rear against the light, diving into the waters of Lake Tanganyika; the other by the Mexican Agustín Casasola, showing a comrade- in-arms of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata in 1917, his back to the wall, facing a firing squad with his hands in his pockets and a cigarette dangling from his lips, his defiant smile showing an insolent disregard for the imminence of death. The first of these photos expressed a joie de vivre at its most intense and spontaneous; the second captured the moment of total liberty at the actual point when death is inevitable.

There were no other pictures – most strikingly, none of his own.

The conversation resumed with renewed intensity, but

this time it was on condition that I gave him something in return for what he’d given me. That meant I had to answer his questions. Suddenly, just as I was lifting my cup, he silenced me, looking straight at me for a moment. Then he half-smiled:

‘A moment ago you asked me if I still took photographs.’

‘Indeed.’‘Well, I’ve just taken one

of you, but without a camera – it’s just as good. The top of your glasses is exactly parallel with the top of the frame behind you – quite striking. I couldn’t miss the chance of such perfect symmetry… there, it’s done! Now, what was it we were talking about? Ah yes, Gandhi… did you know Lord Mountbatten?’

We returned to the topic of India at the time of

independence, and naturally this led us to China and its liberation from the Kuomintang party by the Communists. That led us straight on to Soviet Russia; from there we moved on to talking about Louis Aragon and eventually to Cartier-Bresson’s diary at the time of the Popular Front. As a result of this, we discussed Jean Renoir and of course the influence of painting, and so on and so forth through an unending range of subjects. Through his profession, Henri Cartier-Bresson had had the privilege of mixing with many of the outstanding people who had shaped the century from beginning to end.

At the end of the day, I had collected a wealth of precious material, and I had been charmed. Q

Above: Cartier-Bresson’s wife Martine, 1967.

Below: Cartier-Bresson on the roof of the Magnum office,

Manhatten, 1961

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PIERRE ASSOULINE says when he finally left that day, he knew he would devote a book to Cartier-Bresson, ‘the greatest photographer of his time; the long-distance reporter and quiet adventurer, who had survived from a different era; a man with a permanent longing to escape, and an obsession with geometry; the restless Buddhist, the puritanical anarchist, the unrepentant surrealist, the symbol of a century of images; the listening eye.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: A Biography, is newly published in paperback by Thames & Hudson, £16.95; thamesandhudson.com

Assouline is editor-in-chief of the magazine Lire and author of critically acclaimed biographies of George Simenon, Hergé, and more. tH

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