An exciting new London exhibition pits Henri Cartier-Bresson, famous for eschewing colour in his photography, against some of the best colour photographers of our time

Henri Cartier-Bresson once said: "Photography in colour? It is something indigestible, the negation of all photography's three-dimensional values." This rejection of colour was based on snobbery (colour was the medium of commerce and advertising) and common sense – during most of his lifetime, colour photography was still a fledgling, rudimentary medium. How intriguing, then, to see a small, carefully chosen selection of his lesser-known work pitted against some of the great colour photographers of recent times, all of whom adhere in varying degrees to Cartier-Bresson's ethos of the "decisive moment".

The curator of Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour, which opens this week at Somerset House in London, spelled out the rationale behind the show. "My proposition is simple: take the ethos of the decisive moment, and look at how colour photographers have actually fared. Put differently, if we take Cartier-Bresson's scepticism about colour photography as a challenge, how convincing is the response?"

The answer, on the evidence of the 15 colour photographers whose work is gathered here, would have to be overwhelmingly convincing. But the odds are stacked against the master, with only 10 of his lesser-known American images on display compared with 90 colour photographs ranging from the beautifully muted tones of Boris Savelev to the loud cityscapes of Robert Walker. Much of the work on display qualifies as what we now call street photography, but Cartier-Bresson's street scenes are defiantly quiet next to the noise of Walker, the movement of Joel Meyerowitz, the extraordinary merging of formal composition and light that marks the work of Trent Parke.

Green dream ... Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, 2009 by Karl Baden

Unsurprisingly, Cartier-Bresson's work shares an atmosphere and aesthetic with many of the older photographers included here, most notably Helen Levitt (born 1913), Ernst Haas (1921), Saul Leiter (1923) and Fred Herzog (1930). It's not just that the streets were quieter then, it is that photography was not so self-questioning or so overcrowded a medium. Herzog's street photographs are among the show's surprises, not just because he was shooting in colour way back in the 1950s, but because of the range of his palette. Old Man Main (1959) is a gentle portrait of a passing stranger against a shop front that is a paean to faded colour. Twenty-five years on, his street scene Crossing Powell (1984) is cinematic in its masterful capturing of light, movement and atmosphere.

Equally surprising is the work of Belgian-born Harry Gruyaert, who roamed around India, Morocco and Egypt as well as the west of Ireland, making singular work. A street scene, Morocco, Town of Ouarzazate (1986), reimagines the north Africa port as a mid-western American town, until you notice some telling details: a glimpse of Arabic script on a shop front, a djellaba-wearing man on a bicycle.

Carolyn Drake's strange and evocative pictures of rural Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine and China are compelling too: a glimpse of another kind of street culture that is strange yet oddly familiar. It is Saul Leiter, though, who comes closest to the spirit of Cartier-Bresson in a single image entitled – with neat poetic resonance – Paris 1959. It is not just the setting that recalls the master, but the intimacy of this understated street portrait of a woman writing a letter at a cafe table. Cartier-Bresson once said that when he made a portrait he was "looking for the silence in somebody". Leiter certainly captures that.

Flying colours ... Harry Gruyaert's Belgium, Flanders region, Province of Brabant (1988). Photograph: Magnum Photos

It struck me, too, while looking at the 10 images by Cartier-Bresson around which this illuminating show revolves, that the same sense of silence was a recurring motif in all his work. There is something melancholy in his portrait of a woman lost in thought outside a shop in Washington, and something desolate in his image of a man asleep – or slumped exhausted – over his lunch tray in a Brooklyn diner. The monochrome tones and textures only add to these dark moods, and one of the many questions thrown up by these pictures is how much that mood would change had colour been his medium.

If you look at Gruyaert's study of four men outside a cafe in Cairo, you might think colour is not the issue at all, but how to capture and transmit mood and tone. Then you come upon Melanie Einzig's prescient portrait of a besuited, pensive young man by a public sculpture of some garish giant light bulbs, and you start to think that colour – bright, brash, shiny – is the key determinant of the photograph, not least because the bulbs are such a dramatic counterpoint to the man's expression.

This exhibition mischievously raises more questions than it answers, but the richness of the colour photographs certainly reflects – and at times exaggerates – the overloaded world we live in. You may find yourself lingering longer in front of Cartier-Bresson's black-and-white photographs, not least because, amid a tumult of colour, they seem more timeless, resonant – and more silent.

Now see this

A first British showing for the acclaimed series A Natural Order by Lucas Foglia, the young American documentary photogapher who spent five years in Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina and Georgia among people who live "off the grid" in the American backwoods. At Michael Hoppen in London until 1 December 2012.

At the Wapping Project Bankside, the Finnish photographer Nelli Palomäki shows her stark but evocative portraits of young students at a naval academy in St Petersburg.