The Decisive Moment

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare St. Lazare, 1932

The Decisive Moment

Henri Cartier-Bresson has revolutionized photography in many ways, the most well known being the decisive moment. The Decisive Moment is defined as capturing an event that is ephemeral and spontaneous, where the image represents the essence of the event itself. In other words, being able to make a split moment decision and capture the defining moment of something that is happening right in front of you. Cartier-Bresson himself 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.”

Cartier-Bresson is known as the Master of Candid Photography. He has the ability to know when the click the camera to get the exact moment he wants on film. In the picture above, the man is frozen mid-air, but you can almost imagine him coming down on his front leg and you can almost here the splash of the puddle below him as he lands. Not only has the moment perfectly captured the man jumping in mid-air pre splash, if you look in the background, there is a painted mural that the man jumping is mimicking.

Everything about this photograph is timed perfectly from the man, to the mural, to the ability of the viewer to imagine what happened after the photograph was taken. This is the epitome of the decisive moment. Everything about it was made in a split second decision when Cartier-Bresson decided to click the camera and expose the film.

Sarinana, Joshua. "The Decisive Moment and the Brain." Php Bloginfoname RSS. August 12, 2013. Accessed May 02, 2016. http://petapixel.com/2013/08/12/the-decisive-moment-and-the-human-brain/.