India, Kashmir, Srinagar, 1948. Muslim women on the slopes of Hari Parbal Hill, praying toward the sun rising behind the Himalayas.

Jane Scullion visited one of this summer's blockbuster shows in the Scottish capital.

Henri Cartier-Bresson always preferred life behind the lens. He always wanted to remain anonymous while he took pictures of his subjects on the move. Now the focus is on the photographer himself.

The work of Cartier-Bresson is explored in a large exhibition at the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh this summer. The exhibition will run until October 3 2005 and is a comprehensive retrospective with some 200 photographs from his outstanding and prolific career. It is a unique collection documenting the renowned photographer’s life, and visitors will not be disappointed.

Walking around the exhibition, the viewer becomes overwhelmed by the sheer power of his images. His lucid eye has captured Gandhi just before his assassination and witnessed the victory of the communists in China. You begin to wonder why Cartier-Bresson was allowed so much access to significant events throughout the 20th century.

"He liked to blend into the background," explains Curator Patrick Elliot. "It was important for him to be invisible."

Cartier-Bresson’s ability to `blend in’ made him the first photographer to be allowed into the USSR during the period of détente. We now live in an image-saturated world, and yet Cartier-Bresson’s images are still punchy and manage to hold my gaze.

Liberation of Dessau Camp, Germany (1945) shows detainees from the prison camp being released. Cartier-Bresson manages to capture the moment when a woman prisoner recognizes the Gestapo informer who betrayed her. Bearing her teeth at the informer with animal-like ferocity, the betrayed woman makes this an unforgettable image.

Cartier-Bresson was himself captured by the Germans in 1940 and managed to escape on his third attempt in 1943. Looking at his photographs taken from every corner of the world, it becomes clear that he cherished his freedom and that his incarceration perhaps shaped the way he acted as a photographer. In 1962 he photographed a young girl struggling to climb over the Berlin wall. As someone who knew what it was like to be trapped, maybe he sympathized with the child.

Favouring expressions of freedom, it is logical that Cartier-Bresson would take an interest in the surrealists’ attempts to free the mind. Their influence is most clearly seen in his photographs from Spain in the 1930s.

Like Man Ray and other photographers connected to the Surrealist circle, Cartier-Bresson didn’t shy away from taking pictures of controversial subject matter. He took photographs of Spanish prostitutes in an entirely objective manner, while another image shows a heavily made-up man being grabbed from behind by a woman holding a razor; it’s almost a direct reference to the eye-ball slicing scene from Bunuel’s 1929 film Un Chien Andalou.

Ubud, preparations for the Baris Dance, 1949.

Walking into another room exhibiting Carter-Bresson’s work, I detect the influence of Surrealism again. Noticing an image of a woman swimming naked (taken in Italy 1933), I can’t help but think of Man Ray’s photographs of nude women. The surrealists celebrated the centrality of eroticism in daily life and believed that the mind’s imaginative powers were fuelled by desire. Cartier-Bresson’s erotically charged photograph appears to support the group’s ideas.

While he is regarded as one of the best photographers of the 20th century, little is known of Cartier-Bresson’s work as a graphic artist. But this exhibition allows his numerous ink and pencil sketches to take centre stage - the first time they’ve been shown in Scotland.

They include drawings of well-known paintings; for example, one of his drawings is a direct copy of the Dürer charcoal sketch, Portrait of Dürer’s Mother (1514). Cartier-Bresson loved to study art and regularly visited the Louvre. He was aware of how to carefully construct a painting with compositional balance and geometric shapes and, as a result, his photographs often seem to allude to the same structure as traditional paintings.

As well as about 30 drawings, the exhibition also holds more personal and private objects belonging to the photographer. Cartier-Bresson’s birth certificate and driving license are on display, as well as photographs from his childhood. My favourite is a small box of sugared almonds containing a card announcing Henri’s birth.

Although Cartier-Bresson died last year, aged 95, he never stopped taking pictures of important events. In Paris last year, there was a large demonstration against the Iraq war and Cartier-Bresson was keen to go down and record the event, but his wife persuaded him that it would be too dangerous. With such commitment to photojournalism, he was often dubbed, `Eye of the Century’.

The Edinburgh exhibition will leave you in no doubt that he earned this title.

All images: By Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908 – 2004). © Henri Cartier-Bresson/ Magnum Photos.