An abstract idea, the decisive moment, was made popular by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Bresson was a French photographer known for his street photography.

 

What is a decisive moment within photography? 

 

If you split the two words and look up the meaning of each in the Cambridge dictionary you get; ‘decisive’ - able to make decisions quickly and confidently, ‘moment’ - a very short period of time. 

After looking at the two words separately, when you put them back together you get; a decision that is made quickly within a very short time. Breaking the term ‘the decisive moment’ down helps me to understand and begin to comprehend its meaning within the photography world.

 

https://dictionary.cambridge.org

 

Below are three differing views on the decisive moment

 

“Increasingly, documentary turned away from attempting to record what would formerly have been seen as its major subjects. The endeavour to make great statements gave way to the recording of little dislocated moments which merely insinuated that some greater meaning might be at stake.” 

-Liz Wells - ‘Photography: A critical introduction’.

 

Here, I believe Wells is saying that photographers went searching, maybe too hard, for that big wow, that statement shot, but missed the smaller, more significant things that were more meaningful. 

 

“…what he wants us to see is the antithesis of the decisive moment and the spectacle of the urban experience. Instead we get a very contemporary contingency, a street with moments so decisively indecisive that we don’t really know what we are looking at or looking for.”

- Colin Pantall

https://www.photoeye.com/magazine/reviews/2012/05_17_The_Present.cfm?

 

The quote from Colin Pantal leads me to believe that photographers such as Paul Graham have started to not only miss the point of the ‘decisive moment’ but are adapting it and using it in their own way, a way that works for them, which can lead to the audience becoming confused and indecisive about what they are looking at.

 

“the decisive moment works best when the sudden cut in time and space that the photograph operates through the release of the shutter is meaningful, as it narrates to us in a single frame the before and after; while other photographs of the decisive type remain anecdotal, with no precise meaning, or with no meaning at all, relying instead on the juxtaposition of bodily gestures with symmetries created by light and space.”

-Zouhair Ghazzal - ‘The indecisiveness of the decisive moment’

http://zouhairghazzal.com/photos/aleppo/cartier-bresson.htm

 

Ghazzal believes that the decisive moment has become overused and unrealistic and talks a lot about a decisive moment working best when it creates meaning and purpose. Similar to that of Bresson’s explanation of using intuition to photograph moments.

 

“Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It’s drowning yourself, dissolving yourself, and then sniff, sniff, sniff – being sensitive to coincidence. You can’t go looking for it; you can’t want it, or you wont get it. First you must lose your self. Then it happens.” 

–Henri Cartier-Bresson

 

The above statement from Henri Cartier-Bresson allows me to believe that a ‘decisive moment’ cannot be planned, it cannot be looked for. It is unique and in the moment, something that will maybe only happen once in the way it does and to be captured by the camera shutter in that moment makes it exclusive and individual.

 

Bresson had his way of doing things and I believe that the decisive moment is something that photographers use every day, even if they don’t realise they are. That intuition that Bresson talks about kicks in and becomes a natural way to shoot photographs. Each photographer will adapt the decisive moment to use it how it works for them, their own visual strategy.