Assignment Three. The 'decisive moment'. Christopher Whittle 514314

The process - My way of working

First of all I looked carefully at the meaning of the 'decisive moment' in the context of photography and made these notes.

Photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bruce Davidson and Bert Hardy adopted the Leica 35mm camera as a "mechanical sketchbook" (Golden R.)1. They were able to take snap after snap (in a way that was impossible with large format cameras) until everything fell into place to make a satisfying composition. Perhaps the 'decisive moment' should be called 'the decisive choice' since the moment is chosen from perhaps dozens of shots taken of the same scene2.

I experimented with being even more mechanical.

I put the camera on a tripod and set it to fire the shutter every 20 seconds for 30 exposures. The camera was pointed at a gateway onto a busy road with cars and all sorts of pedestrians passing constantly. When the camera had finished, it had caught two frames with cars …

and the rest like this.

What did I learn?

1 Golden, R. (1999)C20th Photography, Carlton.2 See http://erickimphotography.com/blog/2014/05/23/debunking-the-myth-of-the-decisive-moment/ which shows some of Cartier Bresson's contact sheets.

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Assignment Three. The 'decisive moment'. Christopher Whittle 514314

1. The 'decisive moment' is elusive.2. You have to make a social/political/artistic choice so that each image is populated.3. The 'decisive moment' begins long before you even pick up the camera. It cannot be a simple mechanical process. The mind, eye and heart all have to be involved.

The 'decisive moment' in the Cartier-Bresson sense seems to include what came before and what will immediately follow in a way that freezing a dancer, say, in mid-air doesn't express movement or give an idea of what comes next. "Spontaneity - the suspended moment - intervenes during action, in the viewfinder. ” (Abbas, A.)3

These 'decisive moments' do not tell a story but express a kind of tension that leaves the viewer feeling that they were looking at "a formal flash of time when all the right elements were in place before the scene fell back into quotidian disorder" (Price, D.)4 This example of Bruce Davidson's 'decisive moment' could even have been staged but its moment could not last for long.

Bruce Davidson 1956. Paris. Widow of Montmartre.

The opposite of the 'decisive moments' are "moments so decisively indecisive that we don’t really know what we're looking at or looking for." (Pantall, C.)5

Colin Pantall, from his 12 Grosvenor Place series

3 Abbas, A. http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_9_VForm&ERID=24KL53B_Y)

4 Price, D. Surveyers and Surveyed in Photography: A Critical Introduction, ed. Wells, L. 2nd Edition 20005 Pantall, C. reviewing Graham, P. The Present 2012 http://www.photoeye.com/magazine/reviews/2012/05_17_The_Present.cfm

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Assignment Three. The 'decisive moment'. Christopher Whittle 514314

The ideal 'decisive moment' image should offer more than a juxtaposition of interesting elements. Tany Kely's6 photographs have this very obviously. Her images take a promising viewpoint and the picture is taken at a clearly 'decisive moment'. This example from Cartier-Bresson has the same format but no movement. His tension is all in the mind, hers is all in the image. The best 'decisive moments' , like Robert Capa's photograph of the road from Namdinh to Thaibinh, have both these elements.

Robert Capa. On the road from Namdinh to Thaibinh. May 25th, 1954. A French military convoy on its way north towards Doai Tan. In the foreground: a rice field.

A blank sheet of paper with a pen poised to write or a picture of Eve handing Adam the apple are 'decisive moments' in a different sense. They are images of decisions that have a universal application and a narrative of their own. The photographic 'decisive moments' have no narrative. They do not tell a story. They simply say, 'I made you look', or 'I made you think' or 'I waited here to catch a moment and this is what it looked like', without telling you what to think or see in the image. The 'decisive moment' represents: it only informs when the viewer can fill in a context of expectation. A Martian seeing Cartier-Bresson's leaping man may or may not expect him to land. We understand the physics of the situation and fill in the rest. We understand something about war and fill in the rest of Robert Capa's image. The 'decisive moment' is the minimum needed to show an event and to engage the viewer.

6 http://www.tany-kely.com/p227339318/e50a093ca

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Tany Kely Cartier-Bresson. Velosolex

Assignment Three. The 'decisive moment'. Christopher Whittle 514314

Now I was ready to choose my own images.

Choosing my images

My theme is 'Looking and Not Looking'. I took about 400 shots and narrowed the choice down to these twenty taken in London and on Crete.

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Assignment Three. The 'decisive moment'. Christopher Whittle 514314

I rejected seven immediately (3, 9, 10, 11, 12, 17, 19) because they either lacked the tension necessary to be called decisive or they were simply not interesting enough. I wondered about 2, Walk on By, but decided that the face inside the shop was not clear or immediate enough for a decisive statement. I liked 8, Look at the Book, very much. It is too interesting to be an 'anti decisive moment' in the Colin Pantall, 12 Grosvenor Place, manner but lacks the tension of the properly decisive moment. Number 14, Looking at Nothing, has nothing much to say but it says more than an ant- decisive moment shot.

I chose 1, Not Looking at Faces, partly because it defines my theme of Looking and Not Looking and mostly because it seems that no face is facing any other face yet the people communicate enough to walk in step. Number 6, Checking Her Out, has the man in the pink shirt in conversation with the gesticulating man in black but concentrating all his attention on the woman. In two more steps everything changed.

In number 7 I think I missed the moment. The boy on the left is taking a shot on his phone of the confusion on the crossing. I am doing the same. If I'd taken the shot a second earlier (I was on a moving bus) I would have caught the boy's camera in the shot. It's still clear enough what he's doing though to be included in the collection.

The next two belong together. In number 13 the goddess Aphrodite looks the lady right in the eye. She's really paying attention to the worshipper (?). In number 16 Aphrodite has joined the group to hear what the guide has to say about her. The grey haired man in the foreground is fascinated by Aphrodite's action.

In the last shot, number 20, the girl's father is distracted by something that she pays no attention to at all. She strides on.

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