Master of the Moment

Cradled in the crook of his arm or clutched tightly in his palm, the camera is his constant companion. At any instant, any place, Henri Cartier-Bresson may suddenly lift his battered Leica to eye level, click the shutter and return instantly to whatever he was doing before what he calls "the decisive moment." Capturing such moments--usually joy, sadness, love, a memory reflected in a face or posture--has been Cartier-Bresson's life and profession for more than three decades. He has become the master of the documentary photograph.

The latest monuments to that profession are a new book, Cartier-Bresson's France (Viking Press, $18.95), and an exhibition of 73 photographs now on view in New York's Hallmark Gallery. His work portrays the many faces of France: children at play in the slums, lovers nuzzling at sidewalk cafes, old people reflecting on the long ago. It shows not dynamic events but ageless instants gathered in more than a year of shooting throughout his native land. Though he founded the Magnum agency in 1947 with the late Robert Capa and others, Cartier-Bresson never shared his partners' love of front-page action photography.

His style, says Cartier-Bresson, requires "a velvet hand, a hawk's eye." Carrying a single camera covered with black tape to make it as unobtrusive as possible, he has managed to compress life into 35-mm. frames. He calls himself a "discoverer" and says that his success "depends on intuition, very quick guessing. When you take a good picture, it jumps out, like an orgasm."

Cartier-Bresson avoids being photographed whenever he can, and once gave a television interview with his back to the camera. A picture would show a man of 62, an ascetic face with fine bones and high forehead. He rarely talks of his personal life (he divorced his first wife, a Balinese dancer, and married a photographer last year). But he is willing to allow glimpses of his mind: "My relation to my camera is a combination of the psychiatrist's couch, a machine gun and a warm kiss."

Down with Color. Simplicity and frugality are trademarks of Cartier-Bresson. He works with the same Leica for years before reluctantly replacing it, and seldom employs filters or anything other than the standard 50-mm. lens. He never uses artificial lighting, never crops a negative for emphasis or effect. Says LIFE Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, himself a master: "In the area of reportage, he is definitely without peer."

Color photography has no attraction for Cartier-Bresson, who did 17 color shots for France only at his publisher's insistence. "I don't like color," he told TIME Correspondent Christopher Porterfield. "By the time it goes through the printer, the inks and the paper, it has nothing to do with the emotion you had when you shot it. Black and white is a transcription of that emotion, an abstraction of it." Mechanics bore him. "Why talk about technique or equipment anyway?" he asks. "Do you talk about the pen and paper when you write? Or about the method when you make love?"

On occasion, Cartier-Bresson has strayed from his specialty. In the late 1930s he served briefly as an assistant to the French film director Jean Renoir, and he is now finishing a half-hour television film for CBS on the American South. Video cassettes also interest Cartier-Bresson as a future medium. "One has to be aware of what's going to happen and be ahead," he says. "But at the same time,, one mustn't change one's style. The human being is still there. A baby still takes nine months to come."

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