Photo II
The Decisive Moment
To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance
of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper
expression
— Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment 1952
This statement, by one of the most respected and influential photographers in the short history of the
medium, is a very concise yet surprisingly complete expression of his philosophy of photography. What
follows are mainly elaborations of the basic ideas expressed above, both in the quoted passage and in the
photograph, which is perhaps the image (by Cartier-Bresson, of course) most notably associated with the
phrase “decisive moment.” (Incidentally, of that image, taken at Place de l’Europe in Paris, 1932,
Cartier-Bresson notes: “There was a plank fence around some reparis behind the Gare St. Lazare [a
famous train station built in the 1800s, and a notable subject for the impressionist painter Monet], and I
was peeking through the spaces with my camera at my eye. This is what I saw. The space between the
planks was not entirely wide enough for my lens, which is the reason the picture is cut off at the left.”
Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes forever the precise and
transitory instant. We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when
they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. We
cannot develop and print a memory. The writer has time to reflect. He can accept and reject,
accept again; and before committing his thoughts to paper he is able to tie the several relevant
elements together. There is also a period when his brain “forgets,” and his subconscious works
on classifying his thoughts. But for phtographers, what has gone, has gone forever. From that
fact stem the anxietites and strength of our profession. We cannot do our story over again, once
we’ve got back to the hotel. Our task is to perceive reality, almost simultaneously recording it in
the sketchbook which is our camera. We must neither try to manipulate reality while we are
shooting, nor must we manipulate the results in a darkroom. These tricks are patently discernible
to those who have eyes to see.
— Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment 1952
“The decisive moment” was the English title applied to a collection of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s
photographs when they were published in the United States. It is a phrase that sums up CartierBresson’s philosophy of photography and how he felt it related to life. In the passage quoted above, he
is writing about the primary occupation of his working life: doing reportage through the medium of the
picture-story. He explains that, while “sometimes there is one unique picture whose composition
possesses such vigor and richness, and whose content so radiates outward from it, that this single picture
is a whole story in itself, . . . this rarely happens. The elements which, together, can strike sparks out of
a subject, are often scattered — either in terms of space or time — and bringing them together by force
is ‘stage management’, and, I feel, sheating. But if it is possible to make pictures of the ‘core’ as well as
the struck-off sparks of the subject, this is a picture-story; and the page serves to reunite the
complementary elements which are dispersed throughout several photographs.”
Cartier-Bresson was one of five free-lance photographers who founded what is still the most famous and
well-respected agency for photojournalists, Magnum; the way the agency made its living was by selling
entire picture stories, not just single photographs, to magazines around the world. However, CartierBresson is most revered and respected for his ability to do precisely what he said was so difficult: create
unique single pictures which are stories, or worlds, in themselves, images in which time seems to be
frozen by precise, yet subtle, geometrical composition.
Cartier-Bresson’s photography was closely associated with a specific camera, the Leica. In the early
20th century, as an outgrowth of the young motion picture industry, new light and compact 35mm
cameras were developed. These innovative tools allowed photographers to work much more rapidly,
fluidly, and unobtrusively than earlier cameras. Cartier-Bresson was certainly famous for his stealth.
One well-known piece of lore concerns his avoidance of being photographed himself: he wished not to
have a well-known face, as celebrity might interfere with his ability to work more or less “unseen.” The
Leica is not only small and light; being a rangefinder camera, it was very precise and quick in its focus,
and extremely quiet in its operation. (This contrasts to a degree with the SLRs we generally use: their
mirrors and prisms make them heavier, and the slap of the mirror as it swings out of the way for the
taking of the picture and then again as it returns into its normal 45 degree angled position makes them
far noisier and noticeable than rangefinder cameras.)
In recounting his early experiences with photography, Cartier-Bresson makes special mention of the
period at which he acquired a Leica. “It became the extension of my eye, and I have never been
separated from it since I found it. I prowled the streets [of Marseilles, where he was recuperating from
the blackwater fever he had caught on a recent trip to Africa] all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to
pounce, determined to ‘trap’ life — to preserve life in the act of living. Above all, I craved to seize the
whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of
unrolling itself before my eyes.”
In his brief essay in The Decisive Moment, Henri Cartier-Bresson speaks repeatedly of the necessity of
working intuitively, in the instant. This issue comes up, for instance, in his discussion of photographic
composition:
Sometimes it happens that you stall, delay, wait for something to happen. Sometimes
you have the feeling that here are all the makings of a picture — except for just one thing that
seems to be missing. But what one thing? Perhaps someone suddenly walks into your range of
view. You follow his progress through the view-finder. You wait and wait, and then finally you
press the button — and you depart with the feleing (though you don’t know why) that you’ve
really got something. Later, to substantiate this, you can take a print of this picture, trace on it
the geometric figures which come up under analysis, and you’ll observe that, if the shutter was
released at the decisive moment, you have instinctively fixed a geometric pattern without which
the photograph would have been both formless and lifeless.
Composition must be one of our constant preoccupations, but at the moment of shooting
it can stem only from our intuition, for we are out to capture the fugitive moment, and all the
interrelationships involved are on the move. In applying the Golden Rule, the only pair of
compasses at the photographer’s disposal is his own pair of eyes. Any geometrical analysis, any
reducing of the picture to a schema, can be done only (because of its very nature) after the
photograph has been taken, developed and printed — and then it can be used only for a postmortem examination of the picture. I hope we will never see the day when photo shops sell little
schema grills to clamp onto our view-finders; and that the Golden Rule will never be found
etched on our ground glass.
A documentary made near the very end of Cartier-Bresson’s very long and productive life shows the
photographer busy with his other pursuit: drawing. He drew as a young man, and returned to drawing
in later years when he had, more or less, given up photography. In one scene, we see Cartier-Bresson in
a museum, analyzing one of his favorite paintings in terms of precisely the kinds of geometric
relationships to which he refers above, including the use of the golden proportion (a proportion of
roughly 1 to 1.6, also known as phi, and widely understood since antiquity as having very special
properties relating to the overall coherence and harmony of compositions). It becomes clear, watching
the film, that Cartier-Bresson spent many hours in his youth developing his eye for composition through
his study of other artists’ works, as well as through his own drawings; this, one assumes, must have
given him the confidence to trust his intuition, which had been well-honed, when taking photographs —
when there is no time to recall and apply rules of composition consciously: it must be done in an instant,
as he himself says
It is clear that, for Cartier-Bresson, photography was not merely a craft. It was a medium through which
he related to other human beings. The human — the emotional — content or side of his work is
something he doesn’t discuss at great length, or directly, in the essay we are considering here. But he
does refer to it — for example, when he writes that “so much [depends upon] the relations the
photographer establishes with the people he’s photographing, that a false relationship, a wrong word or
attitude, can ruin everything. When the subject is in any way uneasy, the personality goes away where
the camera can’t reach it. There are no systems, for each case is individual and demands that we be
unobtrusive, though we must be at close range. Reactions of people differ much from country to
country, and from one social group to another.” A story is told about the picture reproduced just below,
taken by Cartier-Bresson of the scientific couple Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie in 1945: it was snapped
just as the couple had opened the door to the photographer. He recognized something significant about
the couple, the way they affected each other and existed as a couple as much as individuals, in their dual
gestures of clasped hands. Not only did Cartier-Bresson recognize this; he reacted quickly enough to
record this perception, this reality.
This image is just one of many pieces of visual evidence Cartier-Bresson has given us to support his
dictum that “content cannot be separated from form.” The essential visual components of this double
portrait derive from the gestures of the subjects, and those, the photographer felt, were an authentic
outgrowth of the essential personalities of these two people. “The decisive moment and psychology, no
less than camera position, are the principal factors in the making of a good portrait.” What CartierBresson thought was the most essential task of photography — at least, what he wanted to do with the
medium — has to do with space and time. In the kind of portraiture that he himself did (and I thnk it’s
fair to say he didn’t consider himself primarily a portrait photographer, despite having made hundreds of
them), time is an essential element. “What is there more fugitive and transitory than the expression on a
human face?” he asks. He was not interested in or impressed by “contrived portraits:”
If the photographer is to have a chance of achieving a true reflection of a person’s world —
which is as much outside him as inside him — it is necessary that the subject of the portrait
should be in a situation normal to him. We must respect the atmosphere which surrounds the
human being, and integrate into the portrait the individual’s habitat — for man, no less than
animals, has his habitat. Above all, the sitter must be made to forget about the camera and the
man who is handling it.
Cartier-Bresson understood his equipment and techniques; he kept them, purposely, simple. “It is
enough if a photographer feels at ease with his camera, and if it is appropriate to the job which he wants
it to do.” He saw no need to discuss cameras beyond noting how his particular camera allowed him to
work as he wished to. His attitude towards photographic technique in general are consistent with this:
I am constantly amused by the notion that some people have about photographic technique — a
notion which reveals itself in an insatiable craving for sharpness of images. Is this the passion of
an obsession? Or do these people hope, by this ‘trompe l’oeil’ [fool the eye: that is, highly
illusionistic] technique, to get to closer grips with reality? In either case, they are just as far
away from the real problem as those of that other generation which used to endow all its
photographic anecdotes with an intentional unsharpness such as was deemed to be ‘artistic.’
In these last remarks, Cartier-Bresson is referring to the movement, very influential in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries, known as “pictorialism.” This involved, among other things, not only extensive use
of soft focus lenses to create a hazy, dreamy, “aesthetic” atmosphere, but often highly staged —
contrived — scenarios, with the photographers’ friends and models playing the parts of characters from
mythology and folklore. Cartier-Bresson’s photographic world is in a different galaxy from this. The
unsharpness of a photograph such as the one below was not an effect he strove for, in order to evoke an
ethereal mood; it is, instead, probably a by-product of the speed with which the photographer “grabbed”
this shot. Yet, I think Cartier-Bresson would argue, the image is sharp enough: somehow, the picture
seems more real than the vast majority of photographs taken with razor-sharp edge definition.
Did Henri Cartier-Bresson “invent” the “decisive moment”? Or did he just work more successfully in
this particular vein of photography than most other artists? Those are perhaps impossible questions to
answer, and I do not believe that any single answer is necessary. I do think it is worth pointing out,
though, that for Cartier-Bresson, more than for most other photographers, the whole enterprise of
photography, the very impulse to make photographs, was virtually synonymous with the concept of the
decisive moment. Other photographers and photojournalists both contemporary with Cartier-Bresson
and following in his footsteps have made wonderful pictures that take advantages of the same qualities
of the medium which he has described and exemplified for us. But most of these photographers have
developed their unique styles, which often both give their “decisive moments” a particular flavor, and
sometimes lead them entirely away from what I am, perhaps pretentiously, calling Cartier-Bresson’s
“philosophy” of photography and the decisive moment. I think one is justified, though, in using such
lofty terms in this context, simply because Cartier-Bresson’s own statements make it clear just how
much he considered his artistic work to be an attitude about life as a whole:
I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently
with the discovery of the world around us which can mold us, but which can also be affected by
us. A balance must be established between these two worlds — the one inside us and the one
outside us. As the result of a constant reciprocal process, both these worlds come to form a
single one. And it is this world that we must communicate.
Anyone who pursues photography seriously as a means of expression — and I’m purposely not using
the phrase “self-expression;” better, in keeping with the spirit of our subject, to speak of “self/other
expression” — has to confront questions about whether this or that particular artistic school, movement,
or tradition allows him/her to be true to him/herself. I’ve read and heard several photographers speak or
write of having taken “decisive moment” pictures in their early development, only to develop, over time
and surely with some amount of struggle, their own slightly, or very, different aesthetics and credos.
For example, photographer Jerry Uelsmann, known almost entirely for his often magical and dream-like
photomontages, in which he creates seamless alternative realities in prints made from multiple
negatives, showed, at a lecture in 2006, a number of his early photos in the “reportage” (“decisive
moment”) mode. He did not denigrate this kind of photography. Rather, he simply noted that he found
it difficult to say what he wanted to say in single “straight” photographs. To paraphrase slightly, he
said: “If I could do that I would: after all, it would be much simpler!”
I hope that each of you finds some value in your attempts to — at least temporarily — adopt one
important photographer’s attitude towards life and art. I also encourage you to think, as you look at
other art by other artists (and I’m not talking only of visual art), about how form and content relate in
their work, and how their work reflects attitudes about life beyond art.
In the following pages, you will find additional examples of “decisive moment” photographs. The first
set comprise several more pictures by Cartier-Bresson. Following those are groups of work by Andre
Kertesz and Robert Frank. Kertesz was a contemporary of Cartier-Bresson, and he, too, worked for the
big picture magazines of the mid-20th century (e.g., Life, Look, Match, etc.). One recurrent feature of
his work is the frequent use of bird’s eye views, which create some interesting spatial ambiguities. His
interest in playing with the depiction of space comes across in his photographs involving the use of
distorting mirrors (not shown here). The tone of Kertesz’s photos seems to me to be quieter and gentler
than Cartier-Bresson’s. By way of contrast, Robert Frank’s images were famously controversial,
specifically because they struck people back in the 1950s (and may still strike you) as dark and
disturbing in mood. Still, at the time he produced the book The Americans (from which the examples
shown later are all taken), Frank was still clearly working in a tradition of reportage that Cartier-Bresson
would have recognized as such. Later, Frank went on to do highly experimental work, collaging and
writing and painting on his photographs, sequencing them in books (but doing so in ways very different
from the ways in which photographers for Life would put together photo stories!) and making short
gritty films (none of which I’ve seen!).
After those works, I’ve included some student examples done in response to this assignment. (Last year
was the first year we’ve worked on this assignment per se, though past students have certainly created
images that fit the definition, whether or not they consciously aimed to do so. In fact, one example was
actually printed from a negative the student had shot as a Photo I student. Finally, I’m including a
number of photos of my own. A couple of notes on these: All are recent photographs, from the past
year and a half, and all happen to have been shot digitally — and in color. It was an interesting
challenge to translate the images into black and white in such a way that I felt they still justified my
interest. This is the first time that I’ve sat down and spent considerable time trying to make such a
translation, and it has definitely been instructive in relation to my ongoing interest in the differences and
similarities between “seeing” in black and white and “seeing” in color. It’s also the first time that I have
gone through a large number of my photographs looking for “decisive moment” photographs. The
phrase has been familiar to me since a Humanities teacher introduced it to our class in seventh or eighth
grade (she definitely showed us the photo I’ve put on the first page of this handout), and I suppose I’m
always aware, on some level, when I am making a photograph in this particular mode, aware that I am
working in a particular artistic tradition. Sometimes this means I ask myself whether I am actually
seeing things with fresh eyes, with my own eyes. But I’ll leave questions about creativity, originality,
and artistic tradition for another time.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Andre Kertesz
Robert Frank
Student Works
As you begin or continue to photograph “decisive moments,” I will leave you with a few more remarks,
cobbled together from a couple of different sections of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s essay: these speak
directly to the kind of artistic and compositional practice and decision-making involved in doing this
sort of photograph.
We look at and perceive a photograph . . . in its entirety and all in one glance. In a photograph,
composition is the result of a simultaneous coalition, the organic co-ordination of elements seen
by the eye. One does not add composition as though it were an afterthought superimposed on the
basic subject material, since it is impossible to separate content from form. . . . . We work in
unison with movement as though it were a presentiment of the way in which life itself unfolds.
But inside movement there is one moment at which the elements in motion are in balance.
Photography must seize upon this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it. . . . The
photographer’s eye is perpetually evaluating. A photographer can bring coincidence of line
simply by moving his head a fraction of a millimeter. He can modify perspectives by a slight
bending of the knees. By placing the camera closer to or farther from the subject, he draws a
detail — and it can be subordinated, or he can be tyrannized by it. But he composes a picture in
very nearly the same amount of time it takes to click the shutter, at the speed of a reflex action. . .
. For me, content cannot be separated from form. By form, I mean a rigorous organization of the
interplay of surfaces, lines, and values. It is in this organization alone that our conceptions and
emotions become concrete and communicable. In photography, visual organization can stem
only from a developed instinct.
The works on the following pages are by me.