Worth a thousand words: A riverside shot by Henri Cartier-Bresson; Anne Cartier -Bresson (below)

The house on the other side of the Seine river was Anne Cartier-Bresson?s most favourite place in the world. That?s where her uncle Henri lived. At that time, she would think Uncle Henri was a magician; he would disappear for months at a time to come back one day with wonderful stories of faraway lands.

?I was very young then, and he would tell me stories of the people and the places he had visited,? says the 52-year-old niece of the famous photographer who came to Delhi in January to present her exhibition. Objectif Paris, a collection of photographs of the city of Paris that Cartier-Bresson has painstakingly traced and restored, travelled to Delhi, will open in Calcutta on January 27 at the CIMA Gallery and will then progress to Mumbai.

?I don?t take photographs. I just bring them back to life,? says Anne in heavily accented English. But she acknowledges the fact that it was her uncle who got her interested in them in the first place. Anne?s mother was a psychiatrist, her father Claude, Henri?s younger brother, a publisher. Anne lived with her parents on the left bank of the river.

But all she wanted to do was go to the right bank. ?He would show me the photographs he had taken. I was all of four years old then, and he would take pictures of me. With his camera, he looked like a magician to me, clicking through his lens all the time,? she says.

It was this magic of photography, and probably the famous surname that she was born into, that prompted Anne to take it up as her life?s work. But she insists the she bears the Cartier-Bresson tag with elan. ?It?s not difficult at all. Chiefly because even though I am involved with photographs, I don?t do the exact kind of work that my uncle did,? she says.

Anne is now the chief conservator and director of the Atelier de Restauration et de Conservation des Photographies de la Ville de Paris, a restoration centre run by the municipal authorities in Paris to preserve old photographs taken by the French masters. She had just completed her PhD in art history when the municipality of Paris approached her with the offer of setting up a unique restoration centre.

?I was the first one to start such a lab in 1983. Even now, there are very few in the world ? the notable ones are those in Ottawa and Kodak City in Rochester, New York,? she reveals.

Anne has divided her centre into three sections and employs 14 persons. The restoration section restores prints and negatives; the preventative conservation section is like a storage where copies of rare prints are made for circulation and display in exhibitions while the original print is stored; the reproduction section prints historical negatives which were never printed earlier.

Anne?s current exhibition has 40 photographs of the city, four of which are by her uncle. ?My exhibition is concentrated on the city,? she says. She has placed old photographs of Paris next to their contemporary avatars to highlight the way the city has changed. ?I love Paris. But I am also concentrating on cities like Vienna and Rome,? she says.

However, photographs from remote lands don?t interest Anne the way they did her uncle. In fact, the only places she visited on her first visit here were Delhi and Mumbai. ?He looked at India philosophically. It was a country really close to his heart,? she says. Her uncle had warned her not to come to India as a tourist. ?He would always tell me, ?Go there only if you have work?,? she says, adding that that was probably his way of seeing India in a different light than the millions of tourists that thronged here, which made his photographs so close to life.

Anne couldn?t visit the places that Henri had photographed ?I went to Old Delhi to meet the photographers with the box cameras, but I couldn?t find any. I guess it?s a dead art now,? Anne says, disappointed.

However, she plans to make up for that by visiting the conservation labs in the city and hunt for long-forgotten treasures. Anne has been swamped by visitors since she came here. She had a round table conference with young upcoming Indian photographers in Mumbai, and Raghu Rai and Devika Daulat Singh have paid her visits. ?We talked about my uncle,? she says.

She now understands how important her uncle Henri was to India?s people. She knows her uncle wasn?t an easy man to be with. ?He might have wanted to let his work do the talking, and shied away from public attention,? she says while trying to explain why her uncle refused interviews most of the time.

?But he was a very fair man, and a very helpful friend,? she says. But for her, he was always her loving uncle.

?It took me 52 years to come to this country,? she says. At least, she kept her uncle?s word. For the Cartier-Bressons, the sights are not just to be seen, they are to be made a part of history as well.