A friend of mine vacationed one summer with friends of hers at their house in Pontlevoy, a village in the Loire Valley. Marc Riboud, the French photographer, had a house in Pontlevoy, and the friends were invited to a party to celebrate his 70th birthday. Many famous photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, were there, and my friend heard this story about Mr. Riboud: he was a student living at home in Lyons during the German occupation of France in the early 1940s. The Germans had turned over the security of the area to the local French fascist militia, the Milice. Mr. Riboud was a member of the Roman Catholic youth group at the school he attended, and one day he and the priest who served as adviser to the group were called into the police station to identify the body of a classmate, a boy killed by the Milice for delivering copies of Combat, the newspaper of the underground resistance. Mr. Riboud and the priest made the identification, and noted that before the boy was shot, he had been tortured by having his heels burnt with an acetylene torch.

The next day Mr. Riboud made contact with the resistance and volunteered to deliver the newspapers.

There is a picture of Pontlevoy in “Gazes,” an exhibition of Marc Riboud’s work in the Gallery at Hermes. It is a rustic scene, a pond with the trees growing from its bank making an abstract design with their reflections in the water. In the misty background is a building; considering the large number of windows, perhaps it is his studio. Like nearly all the pictures in this selection from over 50 years of taking photographs, it is simple, elegant and satisfying.

Mr. Riboud is a Magnum photographer, and like Cartier-Bresson, his mentor at the agency, he traveled extensively. He is especially known for his work in Asia, including books on China and Vietnam taken when those countries were mostly off-limits to Westerners. The biggest single image in the exhibition is an enlargement of the famous 1965 picture of Da Sha La Street in the old town of Beijing seen through the windows of an antique shop. The six windows with their rounded corners impose a formal order on the random flow of street life – young and old, coming, going, chatting. It seems as immemorial a scene as those in the classic Chinese scroll paintings.

In contrast with that China is the picture taken the same year in Beijing of a solitary woman in a meeting hall of some sort. She sits at the bottom left of the picture, chin in hand, at the end of a long table across which 13 teacups and saucers are arrayed, all the cups turned upside-down except for the one next to her. In the middle of the picture the wall behind her is bare, but hanging from the molding at top are four portraits – Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and someone whom I can not identify, but certainly a glorious hero of the Communist revolution. There is a stillness in the room that will change when the tea drinkers arrive, their cups are filled, and their assembly gets under way.

In contrast to that austere image of foreign ideology imposed from above are several pictures of the newer, ad hoc capitalist, consumerist China. In a picture from Shanghai, 2002, the enormous eyes of a presumably beautiful (and Caucasian) woman look out through the mist from an advertising billboard on a scene of traffic, cars and vans no different from anywhere else in the modern world. They are the eyes of a goddess, cosmic and indifferent, whose votaries worship her when they purchase whatever it is she is selling.

As a photojournalist, Mr. Riboud has frequently been in countries associated with war and violence. But his specialty is the backstory, what is going on out of sight of most of the media that gives the headline stories depth. There is a picture from Iran in 1979 of a large wall poster of Ayatollah Khomeini looking out sternly on the street. The deep black of his turban at the top of the picture is echoed in the black robes of two women passing in profile in front of the poster; we see Khomeini’s visage looming over them, but all we see of them is their noses. There is a palpable sense of menace that anticipates the tensions being played out today in the torture chambers and streets of Tehran. What makes the picture uniquely Mr. Riboud’s is a sophistication, even a delicacy, in its design.

Those qualities were present in Mr. Riboud’s work from his first picture published in Life in 1953, a painter working high up on the Eiffel Tower with no rope and no net, but with balletic insouciance. “That painter was joyful, singing as he worked,” said Mr. Riboud, quoted in the gallery’s materials. “I think photographers should behave like him – he was free and carried little equipment.” There is a music in Mr. Riboud’s images, a rhythm as evident in the excited tumult of a column of youth brandishing the new flag of an independent Algeria, July 2, 1962, as in the lyrical picture from Jaipur, India, 1956, where a dozen figures carrying umbrellas disappear tranquilly down a hill into the mist. “I photograph the way musicians hum.”

The exhibition includes a case with snapshots by Mr. Riboud and others of his family and the amazing cohort of photographers who were his friends: besides Cartier-Bresson, there is Elliott Erwitt, Ernst Hass, Robert and Cornell Capa, Inge Morath, Robert Frank, Burt Glinn. There are also sweet pictures of his children and grandchildren, like anybody’s family snapshots only better. For instance, the large print of Clemence, taken in Paris, 1990, a beautiful child asleep on a jumble of cushions and blankets. Even in sleep, something is being processed in Clemence’s mind, something of the necessary deep thinking of childhood.

It is one of the incomprehensible things about art that works of great beauty have been created by men of despicable character. Marc Riboud was a hero, not just when he fought with the resistance, but in a life of adventure and quest. Everyone who knows him testifies in his honor. The sample of his achievement on display at Hermes is bound up with the boy delivering clandestine newspapers, I wish I understood how.

“Gazes: Marc Riboud,” at the Gallery at Hermes through April 30th (691 Madison Avenue at 62nd Street, 212-751-3181).