Black-and-white master is mourned

By ADRIAN HAMILTON

Henri Cartier-Bresson once told me he tried to do a fashion shoot, when that was what the magazines seemed to want.

He set up a ladder, covered the floor with white lining paper and tried some dazzling shots from above. "It was a disaster," he said, throwing up his hands in mock horror. "Unusable. I never tried again."

Of course not. Imagining Cartier-Bresson as a fashion photographer is as ridiculous as ... well, imagining him as a colour photographer. That, too, he tried and gave up after a couple of rolls. He couldn't set up shots, nor take much interest in the sense of texture that colour demanded.

He was a black-and-white master who spied the composition in the scene and seized it spontaneously. The set scene, the arranged tableau, and the meaning-laden close-ups that we have grown used to today just weren't for him.

Not that you could ever explain this to any of the people whose portraits he took. I did a series of interviews-cum-portraits of Men of Power with him for Vogue in 1968, and each one expected a man quite different from the one who came to take "some snaps", as he liked to describe it.

This rather proper gentleman of 60 turned up wearing a sober suit and polished shoes, and carrying two Leica cameras. "Don't concern yourself about me," he'd say. "I will just hover about taking pictures while Adrian interviews you." Checking the light, he would then put down one of his cameras and wander around with the other.

It wasn't what most of them wanted. "Where would you like me to sit," demanded Lord Goodman, the eminence grise of the Wilson government, as he surveyed his cluttered drawing room. "In the large armchair here I think would be best."

Cartier-Bresson just shrugged and took a shot that set him against a large portrait of the great man. The result was a photograph that was grave and wryly subversive.

Solly Zuckerman, Harold Wilson's chief scientific adviser, had an even more aggressive attitude. "What are you doing here?" he demanded to know when we turned up at the office he kept at London Zoo. "I told my secretary that I wanted to be taken in the Cabinet Office."

Nor did his temper ease when I started asking him about nuclear-weapons policy. "You're here to take my portrait, not to question me," he thundered, and threw us out. "Don't worry," said Cartier-Bresson, almost quivering with delight. "I managed a couple of shots of him."

They were more than just shots. Taken from a distance, they isolated Zuckerman in a great expanse of blank walls and uncluttered desk, giving him presence and soullessness.

That always seemed the thing about Cartier-Bresson - his sense of fun. That and his professionalism. He loved the unexpected juxtaposition, the subversive.

He was part of a generation profoundly influenced by the surrealism of the 1920s and 30s. Images had to contrast, to subvert the context in which they were taken. The influence of surrealism on film is well established, but its importance in still photography is greatly underestimated.

"I've got the photographer here for that idea of yours about men of back-stairs influence," said Vogue's editor, the redoubtable Beatrix Miller. "Why don't you come in and try to persuade him?"

The photographer was Cartier-Bresson. I'd mentioned him but never thought he'd accept a commission. By then he was famous and choosy but he seemed to be taken by my enthusiasm, and caught quickly on to the idea of people who were at once behind the scenes and, in their own way and their own lights, men of importance.

The smart young ladies of 60s Vogue found the two of us an odd couple, both in formal suits, waiting for buses and then scrabbling up to the top floor, where I could smoke.

Cartier-Bresson had a sharp eye for life on the first floor as seen from a London bus, but the people on the bus interested him more, the combination of children pushing for a seat at the front and elderly smokers desperate for a fag.

That quality of pleasure in humanity and its quirkiness is seen in the portfolios of the countries he visited in the pre- and post-war years. It is at its warmest and most emphatic in its pictures of the outsiders and outcasts of society - the prostitutes of Mexico City, the peasants of China and the lower castes of India.

A member of the haute bourgeoisie, he was at ease with the middle classes. His pictures of shopkeepers and picnickers are fond, but you sense an edge in the pictures taken at the races in Hong Kong, the top hats and flowery dresses of the English colonialists.

Cartier-Bresson belonged to the artistic world of Paris and to its politics. If his pictures never made an obvious point, and rarely indicated a political one despite the time he spent in such politically charged places as pre-war Mexico and post-war China and India, it was not because he hadn't any views.

This is as true of his portraits as of his photographs of people and places. Although by nature more formalised than the work for which he is best remembered, his portraits retain the same eye for the dislocated context and the mischievous.

See his photograph of Colette with her companion behind and facing firmly in the other direction, or his portrait for Vogue of Harold Macmillan folded into chintz. Just because so many of his sitters were famous doesn't mean he took them at face value.

By the time I worked with him he was already beginning to ease off assignment work. Journalism was changing. The news magazines, Life and Verve, were in decline. Fashion photography was in the ascendant.

When photo-journalism came back with the newspaper magazines and the wars of Vietnam and Latin America, it was with a quite different style. Cartier-Bresson's name was much invoked but his essential belief in the artist as detached observer was not. The still photograph was seen as making a direct statement about a situation. Aided by the telephoto lens, the camera moved hard into a scene or a person to take a picture that made a point.

Cartier-Bresson didn't give up photography, despite giving interviews saying so. He gave up magazine assignments that were seeking something he was not right for. He may have concentrated on his original love, painting and drawing, but he continued to carry a camera with him, watching for "the moment".

The quietness and restrained objectivity of his painting surprised some but in the end they were reflections of the same mind, one that refused to regard himself as an "artist" making statements.

At the end of the Vogue series, he rather bashfully asked me if I'd like a "snap" of myself as a memento. I said no, an answer that has appalled my wife and friends ever since.

I could never explain it, except that I felt that it would have ended our time in the wrong way - two journalists who'd had fun working on a job we'd both enjoyed. It was presumption on my part, but he seemed to understand.

- INDEPENDENT