In the photograph I am sitting on a step at the bottom of the stairs in the house on Whittington Farm in Lafayette, Louisiana, where we lived when my father was Dean of Agriculture at the local state college. I am wearing short pants and shoes that are badly scuffed and muddy from play. My chin is cupped in my right hand, and my right arm is resting on my right knee. My left arm is around my dog, Small Fry. The dark-haired terrier is barely visible against my dark jacket. I am staring wide-eyed at the person who is taking the photograph, though I have absolutely no memory of the man I was observing so intently. I only remember what my mother told me later: my parents had company for dinner that night. I had been sent up to bed, but then I sneaked back down to see what was going on. The dinner guest, a French photographer traveling on assignment for Life Magazine, snapped the photograph and later sent a print of it to my mother as a thank you for the dinner she had served him. He told her that it might appear in Life, but it never did. My mother was convinced it was because she had done such a bad job of arranging the daisies in the bowl on the Victorian table to the left of me and Small Fry.

In spite of the evidence it offered of her lack of proficiency in flower arrangement, my mother loved the photograph, had several copies made for relatives, and kept it framed on her desk where it was part of the visual background for the rest of my growing up. Now a copy of it hangs over my desk where it catches my attention every now and then, and sometimes starts a stream of memories I do have of that distant time when I was a child in a house on a farm in Louisiana .

Some years ago in New Orleans, I met Alain Desvergnes, Director of the École Nationale de la Photographie in Arles. I asked him if he knew of any French photographers who had been on assignment for Life Magazine in America in the late 1930s or early 1940s. There was only one, he said: Henri Cartier-Bresson.