ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY

BRESSON'S DECISIVE MOMENT

a revolution in photographic composition

By Sophia Oh

This is the book

Henri Cartier Bresson is an early 20th-century French photographer. Although he was not a documentary photographer, he greatly influenced the growing field or genre of photojournalism. He said that his 1931 trip to Ivory Coast, Africa, served as an opportunity to understand what it means to take a photograph. For Bresson, the technical advances of the Laika camera are of great significance, as the Laika gave him the ability to capture what he liked to call the decisive moment. The decisive moment is an aesthetic philosophy of what it means to depict the world and especially moving objects in the world. There is an anecdote that Bresson waited all day in the same place to get the picture he wanted. He was interested in one moment and not many. To do this Bresson would often concentrate and focus on something that we would traditionally not think of as the center of a visual composition.

When his photobook The Critical Moment was published, photographers around the world were excited. Everyone began to press the shutter of the camera to capture the decisive moment. Though shutter speed is important, it is not the totality of what Bresson is interested in. For him, the decisive moment is when light, composition, and emotion come together. These moments can never occur after they are over and emphasize the importance of framing. Bresson thought of the decisive moment as a "moment of a moment," which has a kind of Buddhist quality to it and a lot of Bresson’s photos are both mysterious, still, and spiritual.

A crazy and beautiful composition

Take for instance one of Bresson’s most famous photographs, “The Var department” (1932). Someone is riding a bicycle down a winding street and is going past some winding stairs. Although it is black and white and the subject is not clearly expressed, you feel a type of gravity to the picture in the way that it pulls you down the stairs and towards the bike. It creates the illusion of being sucked into the composition. This is due to Bresson’s brilliant use of the "leading line" in the frame. The leading line connects the viewer's gaze to objects in the photograph. Let's take a closer look at the picture. First, your eye moves toward the railing and goes down the stairs. Then, your eye naturally heads to the person riding the bicycle. For Bresson, one leading line is enough. It starts at the edge of the frame and moves to the center of the composition.

“Seville, Spain” is a black and white photograph from 1933 during the Spanish Civil War. A small group of children play next to a broken wall. Some face the camera; others continue along unperturbed. The design of the picture is nebulous; the broken wall acts as both a window to the background drama and as a staging place to focus on the children. It feels like a collage, although we know it was taken with just one snap of the shutter.

An incredible depth of field

At first glance, it seems to be a collage of cut-out rudiments rather than a snap made with a single exposure. While emphasizing both the foreground and the middle view, it feels as if all the children are drawing our attention to them. Your focus is everywhere, which is a perfect description of the decisive moment. In addition, the broken wall’s position makes the pictures feel 3-D because of the way the children play around it. Bresson truly understands the power of composition and what is critical about that moment.

The photo below of Saint-Lazare station captures a man running across a large puddle after a storm. The picture again gives us a good idea of what Bresson meant by the "Critical Moment".

How does that happen?

We know that the man's shadow is reflected in the water for just a second and that what the picture is doing is capturing that fleeting moment forever. What makes this picture decisive is how similar the man's appearance is to men leaning against the wall of Saint-Lazare in the background. We could never catch that in real life or it would happen so fast that we wouldn’t really register it.

Catching the moment when kids are bad

The photo above, “Three Juveniles, Montreal, Canada," catches three boys smiling brightly while trickly looking back at the camera. The graffiti behind them mirrors the children's playful expressions. They work perfectly together. Bresson conveys their happiness not just in their smiles, but in the whole environment. The composition of the photo is so well-balanced and natural that we almost miss how artful it is. And that is another example of Bresson’s notion of the decisive moment.

Bresson did not like the expression “the decisive moment" since he introduced it in 1932. He tells us that the image is always moving, but that at one moment, the peak moment, there is a harmony of form, expression, and content. It is as if it comes from beyond time. The decisive moment is not a coincidence. A decisive moment does not come by accident. It only comes for those who wait and are prepared. There was a time when he waited 24 hours to take a picture. He struggled to find, experience, and capture these moments his entire life.

Bresson's eyes, who saw eternity in the moment, died in 2004, having changed how we see the photograph.

©Sophia Oh and the CCA Arts Review