He was indeed alive in the digital era but he was no longer photographing, and hadn't for years. He was only drawing. Which is what he would have continued doing.
It's not true that he told people processing his film not to alter anything in any way. He had a long relationship with his lab in Paris and particular people there. He did not want his photographs cropped by the magazines that bought them but they often went ahead and did this anyway, sometimes in absolutely gruesome ways. But in process and production he was quite aware that he was shooting slow, low contrast film often on the fly at f/8 or f/5.6 zone focused and his people in Paris knew what to do with his negatives and particularly with his prints to bring out the best of the image.
I think if he were around now as a much younger man his values regarding equipment would be different. He was in aesthetics and even in practice an underground surrealist. Robert Capa instructed him never to let the magazines know of these inclinations, to describe himself strictly as a journalist, which he did, but you can see it, the surrealist impulse, all through his work. If you follow what people are doing now, a lot of it is far from traditional photography and is often a creation of an image that was never before them, made from disparate parts. I think the creative artist in him would be thrilled with the possibilities, though at the same time I'm not sure he would have had any patience whatsoever with the post processing requirements, just as he had none with lab work. He lived for the moment when the shutter snapped. After that, spiritually speaking, he was done. Also, even if he were photographing digitally, he was not a fan of color, and much preferred black and white, and as Salgado does now (also with considerable expert assistance), he would (I think) have gone to great lengths to achieve finished prints that retained the tonal depth and richness of silver gelatin printing.
It's kind of a silly question all in all. I mean of course that if he were a younger man, young now, he would not be Henri Cartier-Bresson in any way that we understand that identity to be.
More interesting to me is Avedon, who photographed well into the digital age. What did he do??
