“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 organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.“
— Henri Cartier-Bresson
This photograph below is ‘Man Jumping the Puddle‘ also known as ‘Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare‘ . It is one of the most influential and discussed photos of the world. Like the photograph, the photographer behind this is also significant in the history of photography. If we want to comprehend the deep understanding behind this 1932 photograph, we have to take a tour into the life of Henri Cartier-Bresson first.
Henry Cartier-Bresson was a renowned French Humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography. He pioneered the genre of Street Photography. He viewed photography as capturing a ‘Decisive Moment’. What does that mean? We fear, we can explain that properly but let’s have a try.
Wait wait. Just let us write this first.
Cartier-Bresson has started as a painter the beginning. In 1927 Cartier-Bresson entered a private art school and the Lhote Academy, the Parisian studio of Cubist painter and sculptor Andre Lhote. Although Cartier-Bresson became frustrated with Lhote’s “rule-laden” approach to art, the rigorous theoretical training later helped him identify and resolve problems of artistic form and composition in photography. He joined University of Cambridge in 1929 to study literature and painting.
As a boy, Cartier-Bresson had been initiated into the mysteries of the simple “Brownie” snapshot camera. But his first serious concern with the medium occurred about 1930, after seeing the work of two major 20th-century photographers, Eugène Atget and Man Ray. Making use of a small allowance, he traveled to Africa in 1931, where he lived in the bush, recording his experiences with a miniature camera.
The most well-known photographic concept attached to Cartier-Bresson is, of course, the idea of the decisive moment. With this one image from 1932 he taught us that if one captures a subject at precisely the right instant, one can shatter normal life to retrieve a transcending moment. The meaning of “decisive moment” seems self-evident from this picture. The timing, the composition, the totality of the picture, an ordinary moment transcribed as a complete statement. It is at once obvious and marvelous, an act of description and a small revelation.
The idea of Decisive Moment was introduced illustratively in his book in 1952. But every single picture of Henri just indicates the idea so very much. We can look at some other pictures by him to understand better.
According to him, the Decisive Moment occurs when the visual and psychological elements of people in a real-life scene spontaneously and briefly come together in perfect resonance to express the essence of that situation. Some people believe that the unique purpose of photography, as compared to other visual arts, is to capture this fleeting, quintessential, and holistic instant in the flow of life.
Regardless of knowing how much time the photographer waited for the scene to be staged, we know about the scarcity of this to be captured in a photograph. Cartier-Bresson has done this job for thousand times maybe. He has implemented his impressions very flawlessly. His photographs are truly very explicit portrayals of Decisive Moment.
So we can have a look at the mentioned image now and realize the depth of Cartier-Bresson’s idea. We see the perfection in the picture. How the reflection of the man is so precise about the position of the focal subject. We understand the uncertainty and the candidness of the scene by observing the details. The feet are about to touch the water, the whole reflection of the man is shown, a man is standing behind the fence, objects in the water amplify the horizontal depth of the surface and the man is just about to exit the frame. According to Cartier-Bresson, the background is every bit as important as the subject. It doesn’t provide a harmony, but rather, its melody — one that competes in a way that turns the result into something transcending. The photograph is a wholesome experience of not only seeing but also living the scene.
Today the “decisive moment” occupies a unique position in photography. The concept, as it has been construed and adopted, has informed an often positivistic faith in straight photography. At its most useful it’s a recognition of the photographer’s subjective act of witnessing, the basis of documentary photography and photojournalism. This form of straight photography falls in and out of favor in fine art photography contexts, partly because it is so resolutely modern in its notions of visibility and the forms of truth on which it relies, and which it professes to verify.
“Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.”
–Henri Cartier-Bresson
References:
Wikipedia
Brittanica.com
lubowphotography.com
truecenterpublishing.com
Fraction Magazine
PHOTO BLOG BY SSAYEED 