“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 form which give that event its proper expression”. (Cartier-Bresson H. (2014), The Decisive Moment, Steidl)
As someone that has been practising street photography for the last 5 years, it’s certainly intriguing to think about the “decisive moment’ theory, specially at this moment when my vision of photography is changing at such a fast pace. Since I started this course my perspective has changed more than it had since I decided I wanted to be a photographer, back in 2012.
The concept, at least in its purest aesthetic form has definitely become a cliché, with endless practitioners (now much more visible due to the Internet) who base their whole body of work in the search of this sort of photographic Holy Grail, perhaps sometimes refining that search, if there’s any refinement to be done anyway, most probably banalising it, in the sense that its formal characteristic are just being replicated for visual lure without any deepening or expansion of the concept itself.
In any case, there is an invaluable lesson to learn from Cartier-Bresson and other masters of the candid: the geometry, the surrealism in the daily life, the total dedication to a single exposure and specially the consciousness of photography’s uniqueness as an art form in relationship to the flux of time and movement. One can learn so much about life and contemporary art form just from looking at their photographs, and that must never be forgotten.
There’s a reason to use that quote to open this reflection. It exposes both the main strengths and some of the limits of the ‘decisive moment’ as a main motif. Sometimes a simple fraction of a second may be the best reflection of a certain scene but in other occasions waiting for that perfect single moment could be totally fruitless. This is obviously not a revolutionary thought, many contemporary authors have found alternative ways to translate to photography what they wanted to document. Relying solely in the alignment of a few formal factors in a single frame doesn’t seem to be enough to capture the current world, forms such as the photobook or the series seem to be more suitable to show a more complex though dull world.
Here’s where I would place myself right now. As someone who owes everything to Cartier-Bresson but that understands that as the world changes, photography has to change too.
Expressing my vision 