Jon Anderson’s link to the Online Photographer blog (which I had not seen before) brought me to this fascinating interview with Henri Cartier Bresson here

A one hour interview with the great man (plus Richard Avedon thrown in for good measure!)

What a waste of a very special opportunity. Charlie Rose’s interviewing technique is very “Fox News” and seemed like he’d read up on HCB the night before. The sound quality is awful, so it’s often difficult to catch the answers to many of the very dimwitted questions that Rose throws at THE MAN. The standard stuff.”you don’t crop your pictures bla ba bla…….Whilst talking of Gandhi , HCB says “ I had all this stuff in my back pocket” ,Rose chimes in “money!” to which the reply is “ no, FILM”
Great!!!

The interview is full of similar uninformed errors. David Seymour becomes “David Chim” at one point!

In his lifetime most people had not even seen a picture of HCB, so to get a whole hour of video is quite astounding .OK, so some younger guys may now think of Bresson as a photography dinosaur, it was still fascinating to get a glimpse of somebody who showed me what beautiful photography can be like. Pity Gene Smith didn’t live longer too!

I have very vague memories of a series of tv interviews with photographer’s ,William Klein etc, talking about contact sheets ( remember them?) which was very well done . Magnum in Motion is doing something along those lines. Yes, photographers tell most about themselves in the pictures they take, but it can interesting to get behind the person sometimes.

A glimpse of the cheaky Frenchman only comes out at the end when , relieved that he is free again, Henri gulps down some red wine and fools around with the empty glass for the still running video camera.

Now a historical document, it’s a pity that it is so awful.