Write up your research on the decisive moment in your learning log taking care to give a proper account of the three differing views offered above, and any further research you’ve undertaken independently. What do you feel personally about the decisive moment as a visual strategy, or just as a way to take pictures? Conclude your post with your own perspective on the debate at this point in time.

The mysterious and mythical “Decisive Moment”
Although Henri Cartier-Bresson is often credited as the person who first coined the phrase “The Decisive Moment’, at the very start of his book by the same name, there is a quote which came from the memoirs of Cardinal de Retz: “Il n’y a rien en ce monte qui n’air un moment decisive” this translates as “There is nothing in this world that doesn’t have a decisive moment”.
The title finally chosen for the French version of the book ” Images a la Sauvette” which loosely translates as “Images on the run”. Cartier-Bresson had been musing on the title well in advance of its publication and produced a list of fortyfive possibilities. It is interesting to note that many of these titles included notions such as instant, time, vivacity, moment and eye. The title for the American versions proposed by his French publisher from the quote by Cardinal de Retz and selected by his American publisher. When asked about the title in an interview in an with Sheila Turner-seed in 1979, Cartier-Bresson stated that he had “nothing to do with it”. Henri Cartier Bresson (1979)

Trying to discover what Cartier-Bresson and others meant by “The decisive moment” has taken me on a very interesting journey one that frequently returns to the notion of intuition.
“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”. Cartier-Bresson (1952)
He also talks often about luck and coincidence.
In the documentary “Lamour de court” (2001) he says: “It’s always luck. It’s luck that matters, you have to be receptive, that is all”
One of his most iconic photographs Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris 1932 (Fig.1), was purely down to luck as he could not actually see what he was shooting. This has to be absolute luck. I doubt that Cartier-Bresson meant that in order to achieve the decisive moment we should close our eyes and press the shutter, but this is a great example of an extreme decisive moment. I believe he felt that the decisive moment is the intuitive moment when everything is “right”. When the golden rule is adhered to by intuition and not staged. “When applying the Golden Rule, the only pair of compasses at the photographers disposal is his own pair of eyes” Henri Cartier-Bresson (1952).
He saw the geometry of an image as vital but felt should be found with the eyes, and instinctively, rather than by technical means.

Fig.1 Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris 1932

Another photograph taken by Cartier-Bresson in Heres, France in 1932 (Fig. 2) shows a moving figure on a bicycle passing the bottom of some steps. It is hard to know if Cartier-Bresson found the view from the steps first and waited for something to come round the corner, or if the whole scene came to him in an instant. The fact that he took the shot at the moment the cyclist was in a particular position, he would say is intuition. The balance and the geometry coming from the eye. “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 organisation of forms which give that event its proper expression” Cartier-Bresson (1952)

Fig. 2 Henri Cartier-Bresson, Passing Cyclist, Paris 1932

In 1947 Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, George Rodger and David Seymour established Magnum  Photos. “The agency was set up in order to give photographers the freedom to determine their own fate and not be beholden to magazine or newspaper editors with agendas that might compromise the integrity of the photographer”. (Tate Modern, n.d.)

Documentary photography and photojournalism had tended to focus on a main event or subject, but Liz Wells suggested in Photography: A Critical Introduction: “Increasingly, documentary turned away from attempting to record what would formally have been seen as its major subject’. She also observed: “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”. When I read this last sentence It reminded me of something I had wondered when viewing the series Heads (1999) by Philip-Lorca DiCorcia. It is always possible that the expressions on the faces of the people do not accurately depict their current feelings, a second before or after they might have been showing the opposite emotion and it was purely the fragmented moment that captured them happy, sad or indifferent for the “life” of the photograph. I am not suggesting this as a criticism, but as the viewer, we make a judgement on what we see, and the fragment is all we are offered when making that judgement.

To a certain extent I agree with the idea that the “Decisive Moment’ can be seen as just part of a much bigger picture and therefore potentially lacking. In his review of Paul Grahams book The Present, Colin Pantell suggests that what Graham wants us to see is the absolute opposite of the decisive moment; what we get is “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 Pantell (2012). I feel Paul Graham is simply saying: here it is, whatever that might be, good or bad.
In his “the indecisiveness of the decisive moment” (2014), Zouhair Ghazzi sees the decisive moment as having become somewhat of a cliche and questions the relevance in the 21st century given the fast changing landscapes and modernity.
The more I dig into the meaning of “The decisive Moment”, the more I feel that it is not something that can be pinned down and perhaps has been interpreted in such a variety of ways , become mythical. Ghazzi certainly suggests this ” the decisive moment is more of a cliche 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.” Ghazzi (2014). He seems to feel that the modern landscapes which are “monotonous and dull” are incapable of offering up a decisive moment”. I don’t neccessarily agree with this statement, asI suspect it’s down to how one defines a Decisive Moment! If it’s become a mythical notion, with so mean people defining it in their own way, perhaps almost any photograph could be a DM: but not, perhaps, in the wa Cartier-Bresson felt it!
“If you examine online photo sharing groups devoted to Decisive Moment photography, each groups defines it differently” Suler (2012)

One of the most interesting articles I came across on this journey into the decisive moment was The Psychology of the Decisive Moment by John Suler (2012). He is a writer, photographer, and Professor of Psychology at Rider University New Jersey. Suler has applied his research to a specific new field of psychology that he calls Photographic Psychology. He tried to identify “the specific psychological elements of the decisive moment” Suler (2012)
He broke it down into ten key features:
1. Composition, Visual Coalescence, and Gestalt Psychology
“A sophisticated composition in which the visual coalescence of the photographed scene capitalizes on the principles of Gestalt psychology to create a “prägnanz” atmosphere of balance, harmony, simplicity, and unity”
2. Figure/Ground Relationships and the Gestalt Field
“A sophisticated background to the subject that interacts both visually and psychologically with the subject in a synergistically meaningful figure/ground relationship”
3. Closure, The Gap, Anticipation
“The visual as well as psychological anticipation of completion and closure, which often surfaces as a visual gap, interval, or suspension of some kind”
4. Ambiguity and Curiosity
“An element of ambiguity, uncertainty, and even contradiction that rouses the viewer’s curiosity about the meaning or outcome of the scene depicted”
5. Capturing the Unique Fleeting Moment
“The capture of a unique, fleeting, and meaningful moment, ideally one involving movement and action”
6. The One Hit Wonder
“A precisely timed, unrepeatable, one-chance shot”
7. Candid Shots of People in Real Life
“An unobtrusive, candid, photorealistic image of people in real life situations”
8. Meaning and Emotion
“A dynamic interplay of objective fact with subjective interpretation that arouses meaning and emotion about the human condition”
9. The Shoot leading to DM shots
“The overarching context of a productive photography session – or “good hour” – that starts with tension, then culminates in a personal and artistic realization that is the DM image”
10. Skills in Capturing the Decisive Moment
“The DM photo as a product of a unique set of technical, cognitive, and emotional skills developed from extensive training and experience in photography, as well as from a psychological knowledge of people”

If we consider all ten of these elements, we would be hard pushed to find any images that would fit all of them; even Cartier-Bresson’s own images.
When I first started trying to understand what a Decisive Moment was, I had the feeling that it might end up being something rather personal. A photographer could justify classifying any image as a DM depending on the subject, the reasons it was taken, the feelings surrounding it and the photographers own feelings. I still feel drawn to the Cartier-Bresson ideas of luck, coincidence and intuition, but open to other interpretations.

To illustrate my point, whilst I was watching the Henri Cartier-Bresson documentary L’amour de court (2001) our front doorbell rang so rather annoyingly I had to pause the video and answer the door. I was already looking away from the screen when I clicked on paused. When I came back to the paused screen I was somewhat taken a back at the frame I had paused on, and immediately took a screen shot (fig 3). It occurred to me that I may have caught a “Decisive Moment” in the true Cartier-Bresson meaning. I wasn’t looking at the screen when I froze the image. Of course it is not a photograph and I wasn’t actually doing the filming, I wasn’t in charge of the composition, but it struck me that the way in which it came about was very similar. I repeated the experiment by pausing at random moments later in the video but didn’t get any other screenshots where there were elements Cartier-Bresson and others would consider to be a Decisive Moment.

Fig 3. Screenshot Cartier-Bresson documentary. The three heads keep the viewers eye in the centre of the frame. There is ambiguity and curiosity . Is the person grabbing the arms of the boy trying to help or take the camera off him? What is the boy trying to take a photo of?

During the previous assignment, Collections, I spend hours using a macro lens with a fairly shallow depth of field looking at the detail on tools. I turned them round, moved them away then forward, turned them upside down, looked at them head on etc. etc. There were many views that I didn’t like and therefore didn’t take a shot, and many views where wasn’t sure, took the shot and dismissed later. There were however a few shots that I took and knew that they were “right”. When I looked at these shots on the computer screen, some of them were indeed “right” and some somewhere in between. But for most of them I would find it very hard to explain why any of them were “right”. I was not consciously using the rule of thirds or any other geometric rule. These shots might not be right for anyone else but they intuitively felt right to me. I’m sure that they could all be criticised in relation to their geometric form and composition, but for me, at this point in my photography, learning and ability “to see”, they are about as right as I could imagine. Perhaps, as I learn to “see” better, I may no longer view these shots as “right”
“What is important is to look. But people don’t look” Henri Cartier Bresson, “L’amour tout court” (2001)

I have always believed that the ability to take a well framed geometric interesting shot is something that can be taught. The ability to use intuitively something that has been learned, is a whole different matter!

Bibliography

Figure 1. Cartier-Bresson, Henri (1932) Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris
At: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/98333
[Accessed 15/09/2019]

Figure 2. Cartier-Bresson, Henri (1932) Passing Cyclist, Paris
At: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/2866
[Accessed 15/09/2019