There is a large handful of the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson that are part of the general consciousness of the West, even for those who have never heard the photographer's name: the group of Kashmiri women, like figures carved from stone, standing with imploring hands outstretched toward the world; the children, straight out of Brueghel, playing on the Russian ice; the point of the ╬le de la CitΘ jutting out into the Seine like a liner weighing anchor on a misty morning; the upended currachs at Dingle, huddled in a row, humped and shiny as a beached school of dolphins, the hallucinatory aerial view of the avenues of trees in the Palais Royal. We know that any new volume of the master's work will contain a sprinkling of these pictures, and Landscape Townscape is no exception.
This lavish production is divided into nine sections - nine chapters, one might say - within each of which a series of subtle relations is set up. Cartier-Bresson is at once the most reticent and the most expressive of artists; his vision here, presented in the individual pictures and in skilful juxtapositions, forms a unique commentary on the world of the 20th century, through most of which the photographer has lived - he was born in 1908.
The book presents a sombre view of man in relation to, and in conflict with, nature, but it is a view that is never despairing. Cartier-Bresson is one of the last of the great humanist artists; as the novelist Erik Orsenna observes in his introduction to Landscape Townscape, these photographs "celebrate the things of the 'real world', including - ephemeral and fragile, neither dominant nor pre-eminent - human beings: the inhabitants of the great stage of the world, who would be only too happy to believe themselves the creators of it if they were not summoned back, gently but firmly, to a degree of modesty".
Modesty is the word. Cartier-Bresson's own sense of humility before the phenomena of existence is what shines out most radiantly from these luminous, black-and-white pages. The images may be familiar, but as Ezra Pound has remarked, art is news that stays new.
John Banville is Associate Literary Editor and Chief Literary Critic of The Irish Times