As a young man, Irish novelist James Joyce used to experience what he described as "epiphanies" - moments of exceptional mental clarity.

Singer-songwriter Van Morrison had another term for this intense experience: "rapture".

French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who saw life through a camera lens, referred to his experiences of singular clarity as "capturing the moment".

Joyce, Morrison and Cartier-Bresson, each in his own way, was describing the experience of timelessness. The best of Joyce's fiction, Morrison's singing and song-writing and Cartier-Bresson's photographs have that feeling.

It has been said that the development of photography in the 20th century without Cartier-Bresson is inconceivable.

The photographer, who founded Magnum Studios in Paris, died at the age of 95 in 2004.

He might have suffered a worse fate a lot earlier. As the war ended in 1945, some people feared that he had perished in a Nazi concentration camp. Some of Cartier-Bresson's most memorable photographs are of scenes of anger by former inmates.

Probably the most famous one shows a shame-faced and frightened female guard being harangued by a furious woman, surrounded by prisoners in their uniform stripes.

Cartier-Bresson's uncluttered photography brings a single scene into focus. He is regarded as the father of documentary-style stills photography, although he himself dismissed the idea that he was a photo-journalist. He thought of himself more as an artist.

David Hockney used to talk about "drawing with the camera". Cartier-Bresson, from whom Hockney may have borrowed the image, said that for him the camera was a "sketch book" - hence the title of the current exhibition of his seminal work between 1932 and 1946 at Bradford's National Media Museum.

Cartier-Bresson once said: "To take a photograph is to hold one's breath when all the faculties converge in a face of fleeting reality.

"It is at that moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy It is putting one's head and one's heart on the same axis."

And yet, to play Devil's advocate, in this age of high definition digital mastering, animation, and telephones that take moving colour pictures, Cartier-Bresson's black and white photographs may seem static and old-fashioned.

Greg Hobson, curator of photography at the NMM, told the T&A: "I think the photographs still speak to people about how you can combine many elements to make one narrative in a picture. They are not pictures taken on the hoof with a mobile phone.

"The portraits - Picasso, Jean-Paul Sartre, Matisse, Stravinsky and others - were arranged He's making pictures that are closer to his interests of painting and drawing, which were his first loves and what he went back to in the 1960s when he stopped taking pictures."

That said, most of the photographs are so small - about 3.5 inches by 4.5 inches - that they are lost against the greyness of the walls and the large white backing cards. Thankfully, some are shown in larger format, and there is a screen on which even larger versions are projected.

The snaps, which is what they are, look much more at home on the brown sheets of Cartier-Bresson's original scrapbook, which can be seen under glass.

I understand that the Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris chose the presentation. Greg Hobson explained why most of the 250 photographs are so small.

"When these pictures were made, it was fashionable in Europe to print in this size on 35mm film. Also, they were made in France between 1945-46 when there was no paper for Cartier-Bresson to print on. I am sure this was one of the things that dictated the print-size.

"There have been many Cartier-Bresson exhibitions in the UK, but rarely have people had the opportunity to see the actual photographs printed by him.

"He was not particularly fond of printing. After the exhibition in New York in 1947 that launched him on the international stage, he stopped printing. Other people did it for him."

The voices of Cartier-Bresson and others associated with the foundation in Paris can be heard on film and in audio-links.

The exhibition of Henri Cartier-Bresson's Scrapbook: Photographs 1932-1946, is on at the National Media Museum's Gallery One until June 1. The NMM is open Tuesday to Sunday, 10am to 6pm. Admission is free.