14 August 2004

A LIFE IN FOCUS

Eric Ellis recalls his rare interview with French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who died earlier this month, aged 95.

Henri Cartier-Bresson was disgusted by war and violence. Most of us are but with him, it somehow meant more than the usual peacenik platitudes.

He had, after all, experienced more than most: Germany's World War II French occupation; three years as a prisoner of war; the communal tumult of India's 1947 partition; the Chinese Civil War; Mahatma Gandhi's last moments before being felled by an assassin's bullet.

I met him in in May 1992, in Paris's Cafe Carousel, an unprepossessing little bistro minutes from his Rue de Rivoli flat, overlooking the Jardins des Tuileries. It was just a few months after the first Gulf War, the one to liberate Kuwait which (unlike the later war in Iraq) his native France had fought as a member of George Bush Senior's "coalition of the willing". It was raining, 10.20 in the morning, and HCB was 20 minutes late for an interview I'd nervously fronted for ten minutes early. It was one of a handful he ever did and one which I had hounded him and his office at Magnum for a year to do, even pushing handwritten notes under his apartment door on visits to Paris. I was just about to leave, disappointed, when a man with a grubby knapsack adorned with anti-nuclear buttons, one of only two other people in the cafe but who I hadn't really noticed slip in, asked me in English if I needed help. He looked about 60, clear-eyed and very sprightly. I was expecting an 82 year-old, so this could not have been him. I was wrong. I said I was waiting for someone. He said, "So am I. Are you Australian?"

"Yes" I said.

"I am waiting for an Australian," he said. "You might be him."

He said he'd been in the cafe before me and was just observing me. I hadn't even seen him. "In order to observe, one must be unobtrusive and able to pass by unnoticed," he said. "This is my great quality."

We talked for two hours, with the ground rules that he would not be photographed, not even his hands or the fingers that had famously drawn the shutter on so many iconic images. Taping, too, was out, as was a notebook, though he later relaxed. It was ironic - no, revealing - that one of the best-known chroniclers of the human condition didn't want any lasting record of himself. It was strictly conversation only: "No-one is interested in me. I have done nothing. I am not interesting. You reflect the international falsehood that I am famous."

We talked of photography - "I'm not really that interested in photography. I'm interested in life, in what I see. The photographer is like the voleur, the thief; he steals a moment, a fleeting moment and then he runs away with it in his camera. Being a photographer you have to be quick, quick, quick; you have to be like quicksilver, yes, like a tightrope dancer."

We talked also of death. "We have come so far in this world and yet there is still so much suffering. That war was abominable. It was a putrid display of what state we are in. This technology, this technology that is standardising all of us, it was so badly applied. Everybody is guilty of this suffering. Suffering, it is very bad, but death, it is not."

I never saw him again after that day - and he was interviewed only a few more times - but I'm sure he would have been appalled that barely a decade later, the world had again been defined and divided by war and suffering. And that he had died before it was over. I sent him the framed story of our discussion. He sent me back a signed book of his drawings. I cherish it.