Sunil Sethi: An afternoon with Henri Cartier-Bresson

AL FRESCO

We pushed open the heavy 18th century wooden doors leading into a large, typical Parisian courtyard and looked around for a lift. "Take it to the top," Henri Cartier-Bresson had helpfully suggested on the phone when inviting us to tea.

But the little birdcage machine was out of order or, more likely, stuck on some floor above. After prodding and peering we braved the broad, worm-eaten staircase and there he was, as he had promised, standing at the door of his apartment to welcome us. Right on top.

He was a tall, immensely elegant figure dressed in a style the French call "un sportif"""white slacks, white open-checked cotton shirt, scuffed blue and white espadrilles and his trademark polka-dotted kerchief round his neck. The first thing I remember thinking was that he somehow exactly fitted my image of what I imagined him to look like. What took me aback was his flawless, accent-free spoken English.

On a round table in the sparsely furnished living room stood one of those commemorative teapots, bits of china that are issued to celebrate some British royal event or the other. Pouring tea, he said: "My Nanny gave it to me. She was English. As a matter of fact I've just been to see her in England. She's very old now but, goodness, all there."

He rolled his eyes at the irony of his own remark""the underlined surprise of an elderly man extolling the resilience of an even older Nanny. Were it not for his distinctively French appearance, he could have stepped off the promenade at Brighton, not Biarritz.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the great photographers of the 20th century, who died on August 3 at the age of 95, was a famously reclusive figure.

Few pictures of him exist in the public domain and he abhorred the idea of being photographed, strongly upholding the belief that a photographer's job was to capture the life around him, not his own. Cartier-Bresson's long-held credo of freezing time""what he called "the decisive moment"""was an exercise in a trained eye looking for a story. He disliked the idea of pre-planned arrangements. Chasing the image was as much a matter of being at the right place at the right time as being alert to composition falling into place.

The decisive moment was the frozen frame between the blink of an eye and the click of the shutter. It was in search of those moments that he prowled the world""or his Paris neighbourhood""the anonymous figure, clutching his hand-held Leica. His images of the Spanish Civil War, of French collaborators being turned in after World War II, of Gandhi's funeral, Kabuki actors in Tokyo, or Kashmiri women on Dal Lake are etched in public memory as definitive stories of a particular time and place.

Cartier-Bresson was anything but reticent in real life: of that one afternoon spent in his apartment among the rooftops of rue de Rivoli, I recall a person of energy, style, clear opinions and effervescent humour. While there a reporter phoned""it was clearly a woman, for he cheerfully asked if she was blonde""to seek his views on the advent of photography, 150 years old that year. He roared with laughter.

"But my dear girl I'm not 150 years old yet. And, no, I cannot tell you how or even whether photography has changed the course of the world. I don't take pictures anymore." Then using the well-mannered celebrity's ploy he began to suggest names of other photographers she might want to gather opinions from.

It was 1989 and France was celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Revolution. Paris was en fete and the enormous windows of his apartment opened on to the grand vista of the Place de la Concorde below. I asked him in what ways the changing world bothered him. He straightaway gave an example.

Entering a public toilet in Zurich recently, he said, he had found himself tripping over prostrate bodies of young drug addicts; he could feel the crunch of their syringes under his shoes. "And I thought, this is where the rich keep their stolen millions, this is Europe's model welfare state."

He hoped India, a country which held a special place in his heart, would avoid the mistakes. We spoke of mutual friends, Raghu Rai and Mary Ellen Mark, whose work he admired. He stood patiently at the door after we left, alert and debonair, looking for all the world like Maurice Chevalier merrily doffing his boater on a seaside promenade.