Seeing the world through the eye of the master

Henri Cartier-Bresson could no more take a bad picture than Pablo Picasso would draw a slack line

I had a Cartier-Bresson moment in Paris on Friday evening, a few minutes after leaving an exhibition of the great photographer's work. I suddenly noticed three boys cycling round each other in tight formation beside the railings of a block of flats. The wheels, the circles, the uprights, the movement, the fun were the typical elements of an Henri Cartier-Bresson composition.

So powerful had been the impact of seeing 200 pictures by the master that I had temporarily acquired his eye. As he once said: "The geometry and structure of the image have always been at the base of my work; the rest is feeling."

The retrospective was at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, at its new site in the east of the city, one of the "grands projets" launched by President Mitterrand in the 1980s. As the exhibition had opened only three days earlier, I thought I would be ahead of the crowds. Instead I had to wait for well over an hour to get in. As a result, not wishing to queue again, I pushed back the frontier of mental exhaustion and stayed longer than I normally would in order to finish the exhibition in one go. By the end of my visit, I realised that there had been scarcely one photograph that I wouldn't have paid a lot of money to possess.

For, like all great artists, Cartier-Bresson could no more take a bad picture than Dickens could write a dud sentence or Picasso draw a slack line. For me, his work is the standard by which all photojournalism is judged. On my way to Paris on Friday morning, for instance, I had lingered over an excellent photograph on page three of The Independent that showed rescue workers carrying away the body of a victim of the Turkish earthquake. The quality of the colour reproduction was incredibly good. When I returned from the show, I looked at it again. I'm afraid that it fell short.

On the other hand, Cartier-Bresson would not have been at the scene of the disaster, except by chance. He was a photo-essayist. He didn't work for newspapers. He was published in magazines or books, or he exhibited. His first display was in New York in 1933 when he was 25 years old. He had started travelling the world in 1931, beginning with a year in Africa and then living for long periods in Mexico, in Asia and in the United States. As he told Le Monde last week: "I like having time; photographers are not race horses."

All the same, he was a witness to great events. During the war, he spent three years in a prison camp in Germany and escaped at his third attempt. He was present at the liberation of Paris, he was in India photographing Gandhi 20 minutes before the assassination and he saw Mao's Red Army marching victoriously into Nanking and Shanghai.

Cartier-Bresson said that it is "by the eyes that I comprehend". And to achieve that understanding, he constantly managed to find his famous "instant décisif", surprising life, as he put it, "en flagrant délit", or red-handed. As De Gaulle once told him, reversing the familiar phrase, you have "seen" because you have "believed".

All this is illustrated in the China pictures. In one shot, local people are watching troops march into Nanking. The soldiers appear strong yet exhausted and stare straight ahead. In the crowd are the usual small boys looking on in admiration. Among the adults, however, is one young man wearing a dark jacket buttoned up to the neck, contrasting trousers neatly pressed, hair combed, pensive, middle class to his finger tips.

Of course he could not have foreseen the cultural revolution that would follow and the dispatching of the bourgeoisie to work in the fields. But there is nonetheless a look of doubt on the 20-year-old's face, as if he had some idea of the upheavals to come.

In another photograph, the subject is an officer of the defeated, right-wing Kuomintang forces. Surrounded by baggage, this middle-aged gentleman, glasses beneath his peaked cap, is sitting waiting to sail away from Shanghai. But look more closely. Slung round his shoulder is a large thermos flask, quite elaborately decorated. Resting against his side is a large, black umbrella. He is wearing gloves and, over his ankles, a type of gaiter known as spats, more 1930s, I should have thought, than 1948. The point of the photograph is how out of place, or left over he is. It is the end of an era.

In the 1970s, Cartier-Bresson began to devote himself almost exclusively to drawing. I am much more interested, however, in the late photographs, now limited to portraits and landscapes.

The most recent picture in the show is a Provençal landscape shot in 1999. A row of poplars line one side of a field. What must have been a strong sun casts a long, striped pattern on the ground. In the foreground is the shadow of a man in a peaked cap. It is infinitely satisfying. And why these trees? In the old days, Cartier-Bresson told Le Monde, one planted a poplar at the birth of a daughter. When she was 20 years old, the value of the wood provided a dowry. This story will forever fix the picture in my mind.

And my next Cartier-Bresson moment will surely occur in the English countryside.

The show at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, in Paris, closes on 27 July