Henri isn’t clicking

The French often break a pregnant pause with the words “un ange passe” -- a biblical-reference-turned-polite-acknowledgment that an angel has gone by and caused a moment’s grace or awkwardness. It seems that there are many passing angels in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s top-floor apartment, with its wide-open view of the Paris skyline.

It is to promote the opening of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson -- with his wife, photographer Martine Franck, and daughter Melanie -- that has prompted the 94-year-old godfather of photojournalism to give a handful of rare interviews, not some twilit urge to speak out. The publicist who has arranged the meeting has warned not to use a tape recorder or a notebook and to try not to ask any questions -- especially about photography.

These days, he receives people at the Rue de Rivoli home he and Franck have shared for the last three decades, more out of convenience than anything else. Seated at a square table by the floor-to-ceiling windows of his salon, Cartier-Bresson stands and greets his visitor with a lucid, bright-blue-eyed glance, a handshake and a reserved smile. It is the first blazing day of summer, but from the cool, neutral-toned, low-ceilinged apartment full of books and decorated with paintings, sculptures and white flowers, the heat is just another mirage on the horizon.

The view behind him seems too greedy for one set of windows -- with the Louvre to the left, the Musee d’Orsay across the river, the Tuileries Gardens below, the whole of the Eiffel Tower off on the right. Cezanne and Monet each attempted to render this view from the floor below, and Cartier-Bresson has often taken a crack at it himself. A summer fun fair has been set up in the Tuileries, a giant Ferris wheel blocking the windows, but other than that, it looks much like it did in a Monet that sits on a side table.

Instantly, it becomes clear that Cartier-Bresson isn’t just suspicious of reporter-style interrogation -- even small talk about fun fairs and heat waves can summon the angels. Even before he gave up photography 30 years ago to devote himself to drawing and painting, when he talked and wrote more about his craft, Cartier-Bresson was never much of a proselytizer. He described photography as a physical ability to capture “the decisive moment” in a famous 1952 essay of the same title. He once memorably said: “To take a photograph is putting one’s head, one’s eye, and one’s heart on the same axis.”

Though he no longer likes to talk about photography -- the occupation that made Cartier-Bresson an international star in the 30 years that he practiced it -- the subject somehow comes up and hangs in the air like a rain cloud threatening to burst.

“Everyone is a photographer,” Cartier-Bresson says with what is meant to be a dismissive shrug. “Photography is not important. It’s instant drawing, that’s all. It’s drawing that’s important.”

For him, or in general?

“Everyone is a photographer,” he says again.

“Everyone thinks they’re a photographer,” pipes in Franck, a tall, elegant, good-natured woman 30 years his junior who sails in and out, acting as microphone, interpreter, mild-mannered referee.

“What did you say?” he asks his wife in a tone that suggests not so much that he did not hear but is challenging her to repeat herself.

“Everyone thinks they’re a photographer,” she repeats, turning up the volume.

“How’s that?”

She says it again.

“Yes, everyone thinks they’re a photographer,” he agrees, finally.

Yes, but there are people who are passionate about photography, who think it’s important.

“Well, good for them,” he says. “There are people who are passionate about red wine, and others about whiskey! To each his taste.”

Is photography the past for him?

(Un ange passe.)

Is it the label that bothers him, whose first love was painting?

(Un ange passe.)

“I’m not sure if I’m a photographer,” he says, unaccountably. “I draw, but that’s something else. It’s drawing that’s important. The first men were draftsmen.”

“Henri always said that even in photos, he was looking for the drawing,” Franck says.

“But with a machine, it’s instant drawing,” he says. “What’s important is the structure, the shadow, the framing, the limits.

“Photography doesn’t specifically interest me,” he adds. “Drawing goes a lot further.”

“But not always,” Franck says. “It depends.”

“Yes, it depends,” he allows.

(Un ange passe.)

“Color is another problem,” he volunteers. “The hot and the cold. If you take photos in color, you have to get out the gouaches and repaint on top of them. The color is artificial.”

Franck pours some coffee, and Cartier-Bresson offers his guest a cookie, then takes one himself.

“Kodak colors don’t interest you,” Franck says.

“No, surely not,” he says.

Preserving images, not words

After a fleet of angels has winded the conversation, it is suggested that he is kind to consent to an interview, when it seemingly pains him so to talk.

“I’ve never given an interview!” Cartier-Bresson half-shouts. “We’re chatting, that’s all. It’s gibberish, an interview. Gibberish!”

He has been politely ignoring the recording device placed on the table. But when side A clicks off, he narrows his eyes and says, jarringly, in English: “I can sue you over this!”

Franck reminds him that the machine on the table is only a memory aid for the hapless interviewer, that the tape will not be broadcast. He does not like the tape recorder, he says, because it catches his contradictions.

“You have the right to contradict yourself, Henri,” Franck says gently.

“Those things horrify me -- they’re spy gadgets!” he tries once again, in the nasal protest of a Frenchman who knows he has lost the battle but wants the last word. And then he says, in a voice thinned with irony: “Because I can say any old stupid thing. I’m a specialist in that.”

His bright blue eyes light and a raft of giggles spirits away the grouch, and his wife laughs from the back of her throat. These two get along, anyone can see.

The Fondation Cartier-Bresson is housed in part of a lovely turn-of-the-century building of former artists’ studios in Montparnasse. It includes an exhibition space whose first exhibition is devoted to the work of other photographers and a floor to house his archives and will continue to show the work of other photographers and artists.

He selected the photographs for “Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Choices” largely from books in his home. They are accompanied by a note: “I have chosen these images: I find them stimulating and moving and they give me pleasure. Concerned photographers, poets, geometricians or talented observers, it’s a long list and there will have to be several shows to display them all!”

Across town at the Bibliotheque Nationale, a retrospective called “Who is Henri Cartier-Bresson?” is showing until July 27. If the Fondation Cartier-Bresson was conceived to not be a museum or a mausoleum, this exhibition attempts to get at the myth behind Cartier-Bresson’s illustrious career as one of the world’s first photojournalists, whose uncropped, naturally lighted, geometric, black-and-white photos showed us the rest of the world in a time when we had yet to have already seen it.

Amid photos from India and Cape Cod, Paris and Mexico, on a small screen, a film shows a tall, strong, handsome young man weaving through a crowd like a busy bumblebee -- his camera to his nose. Cartier-Bresson walks with a stick now, and his steps are as measured as his words.

“I’m not a photographer,” he is saying again for one reason or another. “I’ve never been. It’s a way of drawing only. It is instant drawing. It’s just a gadget like this is a gadget,” he says, pointing at the tape recorder. “It’s what you do with it that’s important.”

Do you call yourself a painter?

“I’m nothing.”

A man who paints?

(Un ange passe.)

Then, and not for the first time, he begins reciting the formula for pi, citing infinity, the Golden Rule.

“I don’t know why he keeps talking about infinity,” Franck says, “it’s perhaps linked to the idea of death.”

He brightens at the idea of lunch, and when a small glass of white wine is offered as an aperitif, he clinks glasses with the informal French salutation “tchin-tchin,” in the sweet, high-pitched voice he often uses when talking to his wife. And while Franck prepares the meal, he puts on his reading glasses and sits, opening his mail, while Paris broils beyond the windows and a reporter reads a magazine as if she is just another lunch guest on any old Saturday afternoon.

The phone rings. It is Melanie, calling from the fair with their grandchild.

“Where are they?” Cartier-Bresson asks, getting up and walking out onto the wide balcony.

“On the trampoline,” she calls out to him. And he squints and smiles and waves, his hand rocking back and forth like a metronome.

At the dining room table, he douses chilled fish and sliced tomatoes in olive oil, takes bites of cooked beet root and carrots and sorrel and cauliflower and rice laced with peas. He sprinkles sugar on his raspberries and eats them delicately, with a long-pronged fork, leaving his wife to ask the guest polite questions, like where she grew up (Boston).

“What’s a WASP?” Cartier-Bresson says, suddenly joining in, switching to English.

“A white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.”

Where did he learn his English?

“Nanny,” he says. “And what’s a carpetbagger?”

He reminds the group that he lived in Harlem for many years, where he was great friends with Langston Hughes.

“I’m from Normandy on my mother’s side and from near Paris on my father’s side,” he says. “But I don’t know where I’m from.” This might be the self-indulgence of one who has had the luxury of leaving home one too many times, and trying on thousands of other lives.

Once a world traveler, Cartier-Bresson doesn’t take airplanes anymore. He hasn’t been to the U.S. for 25 years. Most of his friends, he says wistfully, are dead. This summer, like all good Parisians, he and Franck will leave the city to vacation at their country house in the Midi. A Buddhist has made house calls for the last five years to give him and Franck lessons. Sometimes, they stroll in the Tuileries.

When he has the energy or inspiration, he goes to his nearby atelier and sketches nudes, working with two models in particular. “I don’t have a schedule,” he says. “I live day to day.” He doesn’t draw the view from the window any longer. “The only thing that interests me are portraits,” he says. “Because you can’t say, ‘Redo that smile.’ It’s fleeting.” The man who once talked of the great physicality of taking photographs now prefers the more heady and languorous act of drawing.

“Drawing is a respiration,” he says. “A meditation.”

He got tired of photography after 30 years. Does he ever tire of drawing?

“Noooo,” he says, frowning, then brightening again. “To draw is to look.”

And one never tires of looking?

“Ah, no,” he says, and laughs softly. “Not while we’re still alive.”