The big picture: a comic take on a coronation by Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1937

At the beginning of 1937, Henri Cartier-Bresson, aged 28, was not taking many photographs. He had been assisting Jean Renoir on feature films – he played an English butler in one – and planned to spend a good deal of that year making a heartfelt documentary supporting the republican cause i n the Spanish civil war. He needed some income, however, not least because he had recently married Ratna Mohini, a Javanese dancer. In May, he was offered a staff photographer’s job on the new communist newspaper Ce soir, launched in Paris by the surrealist Louis Aragon. His first assignment was to cover the coronation of George VI in London.

Cartier-Bresson – and the readers of Ce Soir – didn’t have much interest in the pomp and circumstance of the event itself, of course, so he kept his Leica trained on the crowds in Trafalgar Square, many of whom had slept overnight, on benches or on piles of newspapers, so as not to miss the procession. The next morning, as the royal carriages approached, one man slept on. Cartier-Bresson’s camera captured his blissful ignorance of the events happening around him, and made it a characteristic, comic metaphor of the independent mind.

This picture was one of the few from this period to be included in Cartier-Bresson’s book The Decisive Moment, and now features in a revised edition of Henri Cartier-Bresson: Photographer, published next month. The commission seemed to reignite his passion for still photography, after his dalliance with movies (Renoir told him bluntly that he would never be a film-maker, since he lacked a novelist’s sense of narrative). In London, Cartier-Bresson realised again what he had perhaps been resisting – that the right standalone image could tell a complete story.

“Above all,” he later wrote, “I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Photographer is out on 2 April (Prestel, £60)