Master of the frozen moment

The photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson's work strikes a particular chord in the British. Charles Darwent wonders if its froideur explains why

Visitors to the V&A's new Canon photographic gallery might like to carry spare jumpers with them when walking around its latest show. The first part of this, entitled Silver and Syrup, is a torrid affair: works by everyone from Alfred Stieglitz to Gavin Turk culminate in a photograph of Jackson Pollock made in warm treacle. Step beyond the partition on which this calorific piece hangs (as you have to do to get to the show's other half), however, and the temperature suddenly drops. The source of this froideur is not autumnal chill but the work in the exhibition's second part: 50 travel photographs by the nonagenarian Frenchman, Henri Cartier-Bresson. Observers of the national temperament may muse over the question of whether this chill accounts for the keenness with which British institutions have taken on the role of hierophants in the cult of Cartier-Bresson. While the 90th birthday this year of the American architect Philip Johnson - the man, after all, who gave us postmodernism - passed unnoticed in a city deeply marked by his influence, Cartier- Bresson's 90th has seen London transformed into what one bemused French periodical dubbed "la capitale mondiale d'Henri ". The Hayward and National Portrait Galleries and the Royal College of Art have all held major exhibitions of his work during the year, and BBC2 aired an hour-long documentary on the Frenchman. The V&A's exhibition is not merely the latest instalment in these festivities but in a national love affair that began with the museum's first one-man Cartier-Bresson retrospective in 1969: a show that is widely held as having raised its subject's standing from the ranks of mere commercial photographer to that of High Artist.

Certainly, the linear plan of the V&A's exhibition seems intended to suggest Cartier-Bresson's place as some kind of ultimate point in the evolution of photography. Standing in the Canon gallery, it is easy enough to see why.

Like Poussin (another Franco-British import), Cartier-Bresson is the master of the frozen moment. Where other photographers strain against the camera's foible of freezing action in its tracks - Beaton by papering over the cracks with class, Robert Doisneau with anecdote - Cartier-Bresson turns stasis into photography's particular genius.

This is especially true of the works in the V&A show. Although these are billed as travel photographs, they might more usefully be seen as political tracts. Cartier-Bresson was (and is) active in left-wing politics; his travel pictures have what might broadly be termed anti-imperialism as their common theme.

In the Indian images, taken at the time of Gandhi's assassination in 1948, the photographer chooses to concentrate not on the turmoil of the newly created country - the gleeful preoccupation of a recently ejected west - but on its timeless sense of order. In photographs like that of Muslim women praying in Kashmir, Cartier-Bresson uses the static power of the camera to suggest a statuesque quality in the rituals of Indian daily life. The pictures from his second visit to China in 1958 use this same stillness to a more ambiguous end. The photographer's frozen frame turns his study of two Mongolian children standing in western dress under absurdly blue-eyed portraits of Engels and Lenin into a deadpan surrealist joke. For all his socialist credentials, Cartier-Bresson, married to an Indonesian dancer, clearly dislikes cultural imperialism, whatever its political hue.

But it is his pictures of the American South, taken during the civil rights struggles of the early Kennedy presidency, that really exploit the iciness of Cartier-Bresson's camera. It is the immobility with which a white farmer sits alone on a large bench outside a Mississippi general store that expresses his sense of ease with the status quo. Equally, it is the static nature of the picture - the feeling that something ought to be happening - that makes the two black field hands, teetering beside him on a single, rickety chair, seem so outrageous.

Any movement, any narrative in Cartier-Bresson's portrait of a poor-white woman wrapped in an American flag would lessen the image's ludicrousness: as it is, she becomes a living Statue of Illiberty. Walking around the V&A's show, you can't help feeling that it is hard luck on all the world's other photographers that one man should have so extraordinary a feel for the camera's troublesome aesthetic.

But happy birthday anyway, Henri.

"Henri Cartier-Bresson: elsewhere - photographs from the Americas and Asia" continues until 12 April 1999 at the Canon Gallery, V&A, Cromwell Road, London SW7 (0171-938 8441)

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