‘Ah, friends” was my reaction as I stepped out of the elevator and into the Laurence Miller Gallery to see its current show, “Henri Cartier-Bresson | Helen Levitt: Side by Side.” One of the pleasures of visiting galleries and museums is the possibility of discovering new photographers and expanding your understanding of the medium’s capabilities. Another pleasure is revisiting works with which you are familiar — sometimes long familiar — and reaffirming your initial appreciation; after all, the more you see and learn and know, the better you can appreciate the work you like. Cartier-Bresson and Ms. Levitt are universally recognized as master photographers, and they are among my personal favorites. From seeing exhibitions of their work, and poring again and again over my copies of their books, they have become friends, ones I’m always delighted to run into.

On the wall opposite the elevator hangs Cartier-Bresson’s “Rue Mouffetard, Paris” (1954), his classic image of a young boy carrying two magnums of wine, one big bottle cradled in each arm. The expression of pleasure on the boy’s face is the center of this picture. It is an expression I associate with that on statues of Pan, or fauns, or maybe Puck — mischievous, and simultaneously both knowing and innocent. Looking at the picture for the umpteenth time, I noticed the two little girls to the left, behind the boy and slightly out of focus; they seem to participate in his pleasure in himself. Like them, I am always happy to encounter him on his merry errand, an old friend.

(In the summer of 1997 I spent a month in Paris, and remember reading an article in the newspaper about Cartier-Bresson showing up at the boy’s 50th birthday party; they had kept in touch over the years. When he opened the door, Cartier-Bresson stood there cradling a magnum of wine in each arm.)

Next to “Rue Mouffetard” is Ms. Levitt’s “New York City” (c. 1945), a similar picture taken a decade earlier. Here a young woman walking down the sidewalk is carrying two glass bottles of milk; she smiles as if she, too, is pleased with herself. Directly behind her a very pregnant woman stands with her extended belly in profile; her arms are crossed above the belly and she looks over her shoulder at the woman with the milk bottles. She is not happy — but why? Is it the bottles of milk that trigger her dour expression? Does she have some relationship with the woman carrying them? Ms. Levitt’s pictures are frequently social vignettes, like the contemporaneous New Yorker pieces by John McNulty, excerpts of stories we will never know the beginnings or ends of.

Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) and Ms. Levitt (b. 1913) came from very different backgrounds and met in New York in the late 1930s. Cartier-Bresson was the scion of an haute bourgeois family from Normandy, a family with a long tradition of involvement in the arts. He had a university education access to avant-garde circles in Paris, and his talent was instantly recognized when he began taking candid pictures on the streets with the newly invented Leica 35 mm camera. Ms. Levitt was a high school dropout from Bensonhurst who learned basic techniques while working for a commercial photographer in the Bronx. After joining the Photo League she started taking pictures on her own, and through the League came to know Cartier-Bresson and his work. “I saw pictures of Cartier Bresson, and realized that photography could be an art — and that made me ambitious,” she said. In 1936 she bought herself a secondhand Leica, and on at least one occasion went with Cartier-Bresson as he photographed in New York.

There are other instances besides the pictures of the boy and girl carrying bottles in which the Miller Gallery has tried to pair works of the two photographers, but these formal happenstances are not as important as the underlying impulses that motivated both of them. Ms. Levitt is famous for her pictures of boys roughhousing; Miller has up the well-known 1940 image of two boys fighting on the shallow portico over the door of an abandoned building while other boys are climbing the columns that support it. The gallery also has up both versions of Cartier-Bresson’s “Children Playing in the Ruins, Seville” (1933), two more instances of rowdy boys having so much fun they seem oblivious to their mean surroundings. Both photographers are content that boys will be boys.

A wonderful print of Ms. Levitt’s delicate picture from 1945 of four young girls watching soap bubbles drift across the street is up, as well as one of Cartier-Bresson’s plump man leaping across a puddle, “Behind the Gare St. Lazare, Paris” (1932), the most decisive of Cartier-Bresson’s innumerable decisive moments. It is an image that for its absurdity and grace is an inexhaustible source of pleasure. You can see it again and again, and wonder at it each time. Ms. Levitt’s photography is never that virtuosic, but her emotional acuity repeatedly catches us in the gut.

Who can resist the impulse to laugh with the toddler whose mother is bent over his carriage (1942), so far over it that her head and shoulders have completely disappeared into its depths? Or to smile at the elegant charm of the little white girl and black boy in the middle of the street caught up in a juvenile pas de deux (1940)? Or to nod at the familiar weirdness of the two masked boys in a rubble-strewn backyard (1938), one leaning against the trunk of a dead tree, the other shimmied halfway up? Seeing them again, your heart lifts.

That’s what friends are for.

wmmeyers@nysun.com

Until August 14 (20 W. 57th St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-397-3930).