henri cartier bresson decisive moment essay

pdfPhotography and time: decoding the decisive moment24 PagesUploaded byRich CutlerViews  connect to downloadREAD PAPERDownloadUploaded byRich CutlerLoading PreviewSorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.RELATED PAPERSWhat is Microhistory? Theory and Practice by Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon.
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As this article is very long, I recommend reading this by saving it to Pocket or Instapaper. All photos in this article are copyrighted by Henri Cartier Bresson / Magnum Photos.  I recently picked up a copy of “The Mind’s Eye” – which is a great compilation of thoughts and philosophies Henri Cartier-Bresson wrote. Aperture published this great volume (as they are an amazing non-profit dedicated to promoting photography, education, and great ideas). Ever since I have been back home, I have been dedicating more of my energy, attention, and focus to great photography books – and trying to distill the information. I’ve learned all of these great lessons personally– and I want to share that information with you. Personal thoughts on Henri Cartier-Bresson “The Mind’s Eye” by Henri Cartier-Bresson. You can pick up a copy on Amazon here. Henri Cartier-Bresson was one of the first street photographers who deeply inspired my photography and work. Of course– whenever you Google “Street photography” he is always the photographer that comes up the first (then the fact that he shot with a Leica camera, which takes a lot of photographers, including myself, down a rabbit hole of wanting to purchase a Leica camera to get great shots like him). Portrait of Cartier-Bresson as a younger man. Anyways, early on– I was fascinated with this concept of “the decisive moment” – how Henri Cartier-Bresson was able to capture the “peak moment” of every photographic scene. He was able to time his images perfectly, composing his photographs with great elegance (and supposed “ease”). After a few years of research and getting more passionate about street photography– I soon started to learn about the “myth of the decisive moment” – in the sense that Henri Cartier-Bresson didn’t just shoot 1 photo of a single scene. If he saw a good scene, he would “work the scene” – shooting sometimes 20+ images of.
Among the founders of the famous Magnum Photo Agency, and resting comfortably within the canon of the 20th century’s most influential photographers, Henri Cartier Bresson defines his photographic pursuits as those of a hunter. “I prowl the streets all day feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to “trap” life – to preserve life in the act of living.” Bresson writes that he was a practitioner of photographic reportage – or as he simply puts it, “telling a story in a sequence of pictures”. The reportage sequence brought together on a page, in a structured layout is, in effect a time based narrative where each image is dependent on its neighbours to tell the whole story. It is in a way similar to a printed set of film stills.   This description of his own work seems incongruous with his now famous association with the concept of “The Decisive Moment” in photography; that singular instance when the entire mise-en-scène holds a narrative world complete within one photographic frame – “the one that fixes forever the precise and transitory instant.”   In his further elaboration of this idea of constant motion and the equilibrium of the ‘decisive moment’ I was reminded of early lessons in the physics of bodies in motion. In high school I learned that an ascending object must in fact come to rest – actually stop – at the apex of its natural course. This course is a parabolic path defined by the opposing force of gravity that will inevitably cause the same object to descend back to earth. There is stillness, a frozen moment, in all of life’s action that the camera can actually record; Bresson sought this.   Bresson plainly admits that while these unique images exist they are rare in occurrence and are hard to ‘trap’ as the world is constantly moving before us and threatens to pass us by. Caught up within this continuous movement the photographer must balance.
.by Henri Cartier-Bresson (1952)There is nothing in this world without a decisive moment.Cardinal RetzI, like many another boy, burst into the world of photogra­phy with a Box Brownie, which I used for taking holiday snapshots. Even as a child, I had a passion for painting, which I did on Thursdays and Sundays, the days when French school children don't have to go to school. Gradually, I set myself to try to discover the various ways in which I could play with a camera. From the moment that I began to use the camera and to think about it, however, there was an end to holiday snaps and silly pictures of my friends. I became serious. I was on the scent of something, and I was busy smelling it out.------Then there were the movies. From some of the great films, I learned to look, and to see. Mysteries of New York, with Pearl White; the great films of D.W. Griffith – Broken Blos­soms; the first films of Stroheim; Greed; Eisenstein's Potemkin; and Dreyer's Jeanne d' Arc – these were some of the things that impressed me deeply.------Later I met photographers who had some of Atget's prints. These I considered remarkable and, accordingly, I bought myself a tripod, a black cloth, and a polished walnut camera three by four inches. The camera was fitted with – instead of a shutter – a lenscap, which one took off and then put on to make the exposure. This last detail, of course, confined my challenge to the static world. Other photographic subjects seemed to me to be too complicated, or else to be amateur stuff. And by this time I fancied that by disregarding them, I was dedicating myself to Art with a capital A. ------Next I took to developing this Art of mine in my wash­basin. I found the business of being a photographic Jack-of-All-Trades quite entertaining. I knew nothing about printing, and had no inkling that certain kinds of paper produced soft prints and certain others.
Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes forever the precise and transitory instant. We photographers deal in things that are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth that can make them come back again. We cannot develop a print from memory. Even when he wrote those words, as part of his 1952 essay on The Decisive Moment, photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson was ignoring any number of his colleagues. The now 95-year-old master, who made his reputation decades ago as a photojournalist and documentarian, was referring in his essay to photography's unique ability to freeze time – to capture moments in an instant, be it a fleeting emotion between two lovers or, more often, tragedy, elation or other high drama amid war, chaos or upheaval. It can be assumed that he was not talking about landscape photographers making pictures of immovable mountains, or still life photographers or architectural photographers. [And just as obviously, given the year of his essay, he was not talking about some poor soul trying to digitally manufacture a great moment after the fact in PhotoShop.] What he was talking about was only one type of shooting: call it journalism, documentary photography, spot news photography, interpretative or environmental portraiture – even snapshooting. Cartier-Bresson was talking about photography of the evanescent, of the here and now. The kind of photography that, in many ways, defines the entire craft, the entire art. Most photography, but especially this kind, has a tenuous reputation for truth-telling largely because of the camera's, if not always the photographer's, ability to record events objectively. In fact photography is unique among the visual arts, not only because a photograph cannot be created from (sometimes clouded or prejudiced) memory, but because the subject of the.