Part 3 – Research Point

Watch the Henri Cartier-Bresson documentary ‘L’amour de court’ (Just plain love) and write up your research on the decisive moment.

The Decisive Moment – General Research

Henri Cartier-Bresson, a French photographer considered to be the father of photojournalism, he was an early adopter of 35mm format, and the master of candid photography. He helped develop the street photography that was coined The Decisive Moment that has influence generations of photographer who followed.

The Decisive Moment refers to capturing an event that is ephemeral and spontaneous, where the image represents the essence of the event itself. Bresson made a great impact on photography due to his ability to capture such moments. The time between observing, composing, and shooting must occur with foresight and instinct, or as Bresson said:

“Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera”.

Bresson highlights two important skills that a competent photographer needs: knowing and intuiting. Knowing requires conscious attention and it’s intentional. Intuition is immediate and doesn’t require conscious reasoning. Both are required to release the shutter at the right place and time to capture the decisive moment.

Critiques of the decisive moment

A criticism of the decisive moment is that it somehow misses the point of our contemporary situation. When reviewing Paul Graham’s photobook The Present, Colin Pantall writes:

“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”

While Zouhair Ghazzal agrees that the decisive moment has become more of a cliché than a reality, even for its own creator, it still has the status of a myth with too much of an unconscious impact on photojournalism to be dismissed too easily. He believes it can contain something essential of life. In a similar way to Pantall’s interpretation of Graham’s work, Ghazzal finds the contemporary urban landscape just ‘too monotonous and dull, for the decisive moment. On the other hand, despite these criticisms, Cartier-Bresson still seems to speak of something essential in photography.

Just Plain Love

Key Quotes –

“That’s all that matters. Love, Not only love making, but just plain love. Love for this..”

“75% of people just press the button, they don’t look”

There was a meaningful scene in this documentary where photographer Klavdij Sluban visits a prison. “I started the workshop in the Fleury-Merogis youth unit in 1995. Bresson was the first to participate and continues to do so on a regular basis”. Some key quotes from Sluban;

“What’s interesting in photography is composition, not just pressing a button. You have to think”.

“Photography is a language. It’s an art”.

“Observation is important. Each photo should reflect and instant of your life”