AN INSTRUMENT OF INTUITION : HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON: Photographer, Photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson with an introduction by Yves Bonnefoy (Little, Brown: $125; 338 pp.)

“To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality.” HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON, 1992

In these days of autofocus and motordrive cameras, how luxurious it is to turn the pages of “Henri Cartier-Bresson: Photographer.” The sumptuously printed collection of photographs, spanning 50 years of work, is an antidote to what Cartier-Bresson has called our “world of haste.” These photographs transcend any particular time or place. Instead, they capture the very essence of life, be it in Harlem, Madrid, Shanghai or on Paris’ rue Mouffetard.

Unlike the work of Sebastiao Salgado, Gilles Peress and Eugene Richards, whose riveting images hit you in the pit of your stomach, move you to tears or to action, Cartier-Bresson’s most enduring photographs are not documents of society’s ills. He was best at making beautiful images that illuminate the texture of daily life. In their exploration of the common threads that unite us as human beings, and of each day’s small dramas, these photographs are powerfully moving and uplifting.

Cartier-Bresson was an unlikely chronicler of the simple life. Born into a wealthy French family in 1908, he knew early on that he wasn’t interested in taking over his family’s textile business. Instead, he trained as a painter. But his creativity took many forms over the course of his life. His love affair with photography began after he returned in 1931 from a year-long stay in Africa’s Ivory Coast. He went, he said, “to paint and change the world.” He returned, however, dissatisfied with the slowness of painting. He wanted a quicker way to communicate the folly and despair he had seen during his year in Africa. “The adventurer in me felt obliged to testify with a quicker instrument than a brush to the scars of the world,” he wrote at the time.

In 1932, while recuperating in Paris from a case of black fever contracted in Africa, Cartier-Bresson acquired a Leica. The small 35mm camera gave him a quiet, portable instrument with which to travel easily and unobtrusively. He covered the camera’s chrome with black tape and began to perfect the art of being invisible. “The Leica never left me,” he said. “It became my other eye.”

Thus, the photography world acquired its preeminent documentarian, a title he would vigorously disdain. “I am not a journalist,” he said. “I simply sniff around and take the temperature of a place.”

But Cartier-Bresson’s images are important because they show us how we, as photographers, have evolved. What sets him apart from today’s great documentary photographers--like Salgado or Richards--is that his are the footsteps they follow.

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In a 1952 collection of his photographs called “The Decisive Moment,” Cartier-Bresson wrote an essay that has become a textbook on the whys and hows of documentary photography. The photographs included in this latest reissue prove that he followed well his own advice. “Of all forms of expression,” he said, “photography is the only one which seizes the instant in its flight. We look for the evanescent, the irreplaceable; that is our constant concern. . . . “ Those who practice this craft today are still trying to capture those ephemeral moments.

He called photography a perpetual quest and interrogation, and he embarked on that quest with unflagging vigor. His travels in the early ‘30s took him through Eastern Europe, Africa, France, Spain and Italy. He photographed flea markets, the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, rundown shops, laborers, the dispossessed and the unemployed. Some of those early photographs are included in this collection.

His infatuation with the surrealism of the period is evident in the early images from Spain, like the one in which three characters appear, caught in a mysterious menage-a-trois (see cover). Several explanations that would do Fellini proud could easily be written about this slightly askew and haunting image. But as in many of his photographs, reality seems to matter little. One is transfixed by the faces.

Cartier-Bresson’s vision of the street as an arena of adventure and fantasy thinly disguised by the veneer of daily routine is evident in much of his work: the sunbather in Leningrad, the Mexican child carrying a portrait, the busy streets filled with children, the two Greek matrons walking beneath a building held up by statues of Greek goddesses.

Cartier-Bresson lived in Mexico with black American poet Langston Hughes and writer Andres Henestrosa, then moved to New York, prowling the streets of Hughes’ Harlem. In the late ‘30s he dabbled in filmmaking, working with French director Jean Renoir. In 1937 he directed one of several films, “Return to Life,” a documentary about medical aid to the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War.

During World War II he became a corporal in the French Army’s film-and-photo unit. He was captured in June of 1940 and spent the next 35 months in a German prisoner-of-war camp.

His third escape attempt proved successful and eventually he joined the underground resistance movement, then the underground photographic unit, made up of French press photographers, to document the German occupation and the Allied invasion of France and subsequent German retreat.

A famous image from this period, showing the public humiliation of a discovered German conspirator, is included in this collection.

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Cartier-Bresson resurfaced just in time to go to New York in 1946 to work on what was to have been a posthumous exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. The show of 300 images had been organized while he was imprisoned, and presumed dead.

In 1954, according to the encyclopedia “Current Biography,” the Louvre broke a long precedent and made his photographs the subject of its first photo exhibition. The museum accorded him the honor a second time in 1966, making him the only photographer in its history to have two one-man shows.

His books of photographs have documented his travels in Europe, Russia, China, France, Asia and the United States and he was one of the organizers who, along with David Seymour and Robert Capa and others, began the Magnum agency, a cooperative of some of this century’s preeminent photojournalists. Magnum was formed to give photographers artistic control over the use of their work and a fair share in the profits.

He claimed to have given up photography in 1973, and has spent the years since then painting and drawing, as he did at the start of his artistic career.

There is a joy of life, an energy, that radiates from the pages of this collection. The short essay written for this edition describes his feelings about his work. “For me, the camera is a sketchbook, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity,” he says, “the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to give meaning to the world, one must feel involved in what one singles out through the viewfinder. . . . For me, photography is to place head, heart and eye along the same line of sight.” His talent and timing were legendary, as was his ability to edit in the camera before he shot one frame. “Photo-reporting presents the essentials of a problem,” he wrote in 1952, “or it records an event . . . so rich in possibilities that you hover around while it develops. You hunt for the solution. Sometimes you find it in the fraction of a second; sometimes it takes hours, or even days.”

He disdains the trappings of the modern age: motordrives that allow you to shoot too much film, and darkroom manipulation. One can only imagine what he would think of today’s computers that allow you to add things to an image that aren’t there and subtract things from an image that are.

Many of the photographs here have been published before and they are as familiar as old friends: the blur of a bicyclist rounding a corner at the foot of a beautifully curved staircase; the wall of a huge apartment building looming as a backdrop to playful children and one very large man in Madrid; a New England grandmother caught mid-conversation, draped in an American flag; a French family pitching an awning for a picnic beside the Seine. But familiarity doesn’t diminish the impact or the visual pleasure of meeting these images again. They are rich with the ironies and rhythm of life, each with an integrity of its own, a weight that makes you want to stop and study it.

They are simple images, yet you can look deeper and always find more to see. One of my favorites is a little boy carrying two bottles of red wine (left), perhaps on his way home for the noon meal. Here is a most ordinary task, something we can see everywhere every day, yet this photograph sticks in the mind. Is it the angle of the bottles? The jaunt in the boy’s step? The expression on his face is full of the pleasure he takes in performing so very important a task and in doing it so well. In the background, other children are frittering away their time playing in the streets while he is on an important mission.

These nuances, the stories we can tell from his photographs, are what make Cartier-Bresson inimitable. “What is more fugitive than a facial expression?” he has asked. Anyone who has ever pointed a camera at a subject and waited a split second too long to open the shutter knows how right he is.

Most of the photographs in this collection have already been published. Cartier-Bresson was involved in the choice of photographs for this latest collection. Only one recent work, dating 1989, has been added. When he gave up photography to return to painting and drawing, he claimed, “I had said all I wanted to say.”

But we can still reap the rewards of the rich legacy of images he left behind. They speak to us, in many voices.