NEW YORK—Martine Franck has been taking photographs since the mid-1960s and has accumulated one of the most remarkable bodies of work in the history of the medium. She joined the VU photographic agency in 1970, married Henri Cartier-Bresson the next year, and in 1972 helped establish the VIVA agency in Paris. She then began her long-term project of photographing the elderly, the results of which first appeared in book form as Le Temps de viellir in 1980. Three years later she became a full member of the Magnum agency, and since then she has worked around the world making memorable images of everything from Tibetan tulkus, to Robert Wilson’s work for the Comedie-Francaise, to the tiny community of Tory Island, Donegal, Ireland. In addition, she is a close friend of Ariane Mnouchkine, founder of the Théâtre du Soleil, and has photographed the company throughout her career. In all of this work, abiding interests in portraiture, landscape, and human psychology have been constant threads.

In 2003 Franck founded the Fondation Cartier-Bresson, which, since her husband’s death in 2004, has worked to promote his work. And now, she is enjoying something of a resurgence of interest in her own work with Phaidon having just published a new selection of her photos in their 55 Series and Actes Sud/Delpire having published Photopoche: Martine Franck in France. Last week, Franck took time to speak to ARTINFO from her country home near Avignon.

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Martine, though you’ve always made a wide range of photographs, I am very struck by how often you return to images of people who are either alone or who are different in some way. Do you see photography as a tool for describing difference?

A tool for describing difference? Maybe I do express difference in my images. I’m sure I express loneliness. I hope I express happiness. But you know, I never think about these things when I photograph, because what I do is so instinctive. I happen to meet people and then I photograph them; I don’t have any strategy about it. It’s not done in any purposeful way.

Let me put it another way, do you see photography as a means of exploring the differences that one encounters in the world? Photography and travel seem always to have gone hand in hand for you, from your very first trip to China in 1964.

I think I started seriously taking photographs because I wanted to meet people and I wanted to have a function. Being a photographer made that possible, because otherwise I was very shy. I found it much easier to talk to people when I was taking photographs, as opposed to just going up to them and talking. Even today it’s fantastic being a photographer because I can call up people and say, “I’d like to take your portrait.” I do that because I want to meet certain people. It’s like meeting your kin, as it were.

I’ve always been intrigued by your comment that taking someone’s photograph is rather like meeting them on a train.

Yes, it’s very true. It’s like an encounter in a closed carriage. When you’re taking someone’s portrait you know perfectly well that you’re not going to see them again. So, often they tell you things that they wouldn’t tell if you were going to see each other every day.

Your work, as you say, portrays both sadness and happiness, but it seems to me that there’s always something melancholic about your portrayals of happiness.

Well, that’s the nature of happiness. You know that it’s not going to last. It’s fleeting, it’s fragile, and it’s this ephemeral quality that I find fascinating. You can capture it in photography. You can also capture it in the cinema. It’s harder to capture in painting.

Would you say that your work is about the fragility of the human spirit then, or about its strength?

I think the fragility more than the strength.

What would you say to the suggestion that the key balance in your work is between curiosity and compassion?

Both are essential. To start with curiosity: if you’re not curious about the world in which you live, you’re not going to take the kind of photographs that I like.