Decisive Moment by Elaine Lai

DECISIVE MOMENT

the eclectic eye of henri cartier-bresson

ÂŠ 2013 Thames & Hudson Ltd, London All right reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. This edition published in 2013 in the United States of America by Thams & Hudson Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 thamesandhudsonusa.com Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2005118077 isbn-13: 978-0-500-51223-4 isbn-10: 0-500-51223-x Printed and bound in the United States 2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Turning from painting to photography “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.”

Fix eternity in an instant “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.”

A minute part of reality “It is putting one’s head, one’s eye and one’s heart on the same axis. The photograph itself doesn’t interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.”

1 2 3

form / 09 moment / 25 depth / 43

Copyrights / 02 Introduction / 07 Colophon / 57 5

INTRODUCTION

It could be said that this book is about one man’s view of the first half of the twentieth century. Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the most influential photographers in the 20th century, famous for his“the decisive moment” that established the foundation for the modern photojournalism. My concept in designing this book is to take the aspects of “the decisive moment” and apply it in the typographic context. I wanted to explore the purely visual language that not only shows the world of flat dimension — photography, but captures the depth of time — the moment with types. Typography, being traditionally a means of one-dimension, with a little help of design elements, could be planned, manipulated and laid out experimentally to bring movements to the two-dimensional prints. The stark contrast of black-and-white implied the positive and negative film in the predigital era; it also represents the essence of photography: when the light was captured, by the opening of the shutter, the moment of a fraction of reality was frozen in the black box.

inside the sliding doors of the bullfight arena, valencia, spain, 1933.

the form

turning from painting to photography

france, 1932 Henri, be very careful. You must not have a label of a surrealist photographer. If you do, you won’t have an assignment and you’ll be like a hothouse plant. Do whatever you like, but the label should be “photojournalist.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson was born and attended school in a village not far from Paris. In 1927–28 he studied in Paris with André Lhote, an artist and critic associated with the Cubist movement. Lhote implanted in him a lifelong interest in painting, a crucial factor in the education of his vision. In 1929 Cartier-Bresson went to the University of Cambridge, where he studied 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 in Africa in 1931, where he lived in the bush, recording his experiences with a miniature camera. There he contracted blackwater fever, necessitating his return to France. The portability of a small camera and the ease with which one could record instantaneous impressions must have struck a sympathetic chord, for in 1933 he purchased his first 35-mm Leica. The use of this type of camera was particularly relevant to Cartier-Bresson. It lent itself not only to spontaneity but to anonymity as well. So much did Cartier-Bresson wish to remain a silent, and even unseen, witness, that he covered the bright chromium parts of his camera with black tape to render it less visible, and he sometimes hid the camera under a handkerchief. The man was similarly reticent about his life and work.

In his more than 40 years as a photographer, CartierBresson wandered continually around the world. But there was nothing compulsive about his travels, and he explicitly expressed a desire to move slowly, to “live on proper terms” in each country, to take his time, so that he became totally immersed in the environment. In 1937 Cartier-Bresson produced a documentary film, his first, on medical aid in the Spanish Civil War. The date also marked his first reportage photographs made for newspapers and magazines. ¶ Often fertilized by the use of his first Leica, these slowly growing roots emerged during his early travels: Spain and Italy from 1932 in the company of André Pieyre de Mandiargues. The young Cartier-Bresson brought back never-to-beforgotten photographs. Then came the experience of the Popular Front in 1937, that brief interlude of sunshine during an oppressive and threatening time. He followed the progress of the Liberation with the Allied armies, filming it as if, with the acceleration of time, for once he had to document it with a cine-camera; then came more travels in 1955, Berlin, Germany in particular.

Primarily a place, a landscape, a land perhaps, whose geological components are still discernible. The long row of sand dunes in the north, and the sensation of walking over ground from which the sea withdrew the night before. Modest little houses sheltering behind dunes and pigs squelching in mud behind low brick walls. Then hills of sandstone, of fine sand, of clay and of sediment which little by little became terra fima, where towns have now been built. The plain, stretching to infinity, the long plain which begins in Flanders and ends only in Poland, with its rows of poplars and beeches, its rich, soft pastures, its swamps. A river at last, the Rhine…. A landscape with the precision of a diagram, waterlogged, with its mist, its fog banks, its snows—an ideal North. Why do photographs trace such an accurate portrait of the North, as solidly engraved in our memory as it is inscribed on the negative plates? ¶ The South, a contrasting image, with…. But what is the use of describing it? Here too, who does not remember essential features: Tuscany, the Abruzzi, Spain, a Mediterranean whose components do not blend?

Thus, in the first instance, Cartier-Bresson is its incomparable geographer whose eye, attentive to the accidents of terrain, as well as to the multiple signs marking manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s age-old occupation of hollowing out, ridging and hedging the earth by hand, has become the inhabitant of a Europe whose features have suddenly begun to resemble each other. From the Scandinavian shield to the Yugoslavian Karst, from the Breton granites to the Irish bogs, it is now one country, scorning frontiers and customs posts. He restores the vanished features of rural Europe, the strangely silence, where the motor did not exist, and where everything was still done by draught animals and human hand. Like a lord he holds sway over a single land, imposing on the infinite diversity of cultures, on the deeply cunning anarchy of soil, on the complexity of hills and valleys, on the variety of fields and foliage, on the jumble of roads and fallow, the unity of his eye.

Without doubt, some time is needed before one can understand how the photographer works to domesticate nature, and even bend it to his law. Take, for example, three different landscapes that are surprisingly related: the first of snow-covered slopes by the Rhine, the second of an arid Spanish mesa, the third of hills in the south of Portugal. Now, if in reality they differ greatly, the photographic print connects them by a single code. Âś Organized in this way on the surface, the photograph, now an imperiously planned and austerely geometrical composition, has dissolved the mere accidents of landscape. He believed in composing his photographs in the viewfinder, not in the darkroom. He showcased this belief by having nearly all his photographs printed only at full-frame and completely free of any cropping or other darkroom manipulation.

i just thought that the camera was a quick way of drawing intuitively .

rome, 1951

Indeed, he emphasized that the entire negative had been used by extending the area reproduced on the print to include a thick black border around the frame. CartierBresson worked exclusively in black and white, other than a few unsuccessful attempts in color. ¶ Thus, he never developed or made his own prints. He said: “I’ve never been interested in the process of photography, never, never. Right from the beginning. For me, photograph, with a small camera like the Leica is an instant drawing.”

Is there any word more beautiful than ‘journal’, a word so compromised? The ritual of light, heliophany, the citizen’s daily prayer at each revolution of the sun, the salutation offered up to human solidarity, the memento vivendi of those who have done us the favour of being our contemporaries. The photographer is their celebrant. ¶ Suspicion briefly enters our minds. Did these moments ever really exist? Did these crowds ever really gather? Were these posters rousing people to action ever really stuck to walls? These ploughed fields, these exchanged looks, these events, were they real?

There are times when one would like words to have the lightness of images, to settle on things with the delicacy of a feather. Writers envy the agility of the photographer’s grasp. Hardly has a word been formed than it is weighted and tips the scale. Never exactly right. Always a little too heavy for what it has to say. Doubtless one can change it, find another. But each time its weight is measured in ink and lead. Doubtless one can amend it, correct it, nuance it, make it more explicit. But his is to pile weight on to existing heaviness. A photograph retains the light and airy aspect of the camera’s click. It is like the ‘dicky bird’ which, it is said, emerges when the shot is taken: little soul, Hadrian’s animula, vagula, blandula, it escapes to animate, to breathe life into the photographer’s negative, and therefore all people are right to fear its power. It sides with the angels, Daniel, Ariel, Gabriel, the sound of its wings a murmur across the sky, while the word remains grey and grounded. There is no escape from words, but photography is blessed with the gift of grace. The print, once selected, remains both immaterial and irrefutable.

Eternally dependent on painting, whose reincarnations it embraces with singular fidelity, beginning with Corot, Courbet and especially Manet, photography is going through a crisis of virtue: it is aiming at the pure image, at form in itself, at crystal clarity, at the perfection of means.

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotiv.

All of his pre-war travels were impregnated with the desire for discovery and an insatiable curiosity about ‘what’s happening elsewhere’. When he was quite young, he attended the meetings of the Surrealists at Place Blanche and his experience allowed him to establish a close friendship with René Crevel, as well as with Andre Breton. ‘I liked Breton’s conception of Surrealism a great deal, the role of spontaneous expression and intuition and, above all, the attitude of revolt,’ he recalled. But after his initial stirrings with photography in the 1930s, he made a first break in order to explore filmmaking. ¶ For Cartier-Bresson, the image could in fact take different forms and at that time, he wanted to learn film. He first tried to gain some experience with Paul Strand in 1935 but his real knowledge came from the periods spent working as Jean renoir’s assistant. Convinced that he did not have the imagination it took to create a fiction film, he made three documentaries during the period before the exhibition. But in the end, encouraged by the exhibit and the creation of Magnum, he was to opt for a way of living: the ‘photo-journalism’ which Capa proposed but when he adapted in his own way, as a kind of diary. ¶ In 1947, at the age of thirty-eight, the moment had come for him to choose a direction and seize the opportunity. ‘There’s no such thing as chance,’ he often said. Despite all the attempts to make Cartier-Bresson synonymous with the ‘decisive moment’—he exercised his intuition, with his eye to the wind, giving free rein to his imagination, from life.

mexico,

1934

I was visiting the museum and happened to look out of an upstairs window, and saw this empty marketplace, stark in its lack of activity.

italy, 1933

The youthful adventurer in Africa a la Rimbaud in 1931 and the ripe old man who still had so many things to learn in drawing were one and the same person, fascinated by life and marked by his time. His approach to photography evolved, changed with maturity, and his works clearly indicated the turning point which he expressed well in an interview with Herve Guibert: I set out in search of photography for its own sake, a bit like you make a poem.

The narrow street of Barcelonaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s roughest quarter is the home of prostitutes, petty thieves and dope peddlers. But I saw a fruit vendor sleeping against a wall and was struck by the surprisingly gentle and articulate drawing scrawled there. 22

there is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.

the movement

For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.

fix eternity in an instant

Returning to France, Cartier-Bresson recuperated in Marseille in late 1931 and deepened his relationship with the Surrealists. He became inspired by a 1930 photograph by Hungarian photojournalist Martin Munkacsi showing three naked young African boys, caught in near-silhouette, running into the surf of Lake Tanganyika. Titled Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika, this captured the freedom, grace and spontaneity of their movement and their joy at being alive. Cartier-Bresson said: “The only thing which completely was an amazement to me and brought me to photography was the work of Munkacsi. When I saw the photograph of Munkacsi of the black kids running in a wave I couldn’t believe such a thing could be caught with the camera. I said damn it, I took my camera and went out into the street.” ¶ That photograph inspired him to stop painting and to take up photography seriously. He explained, “I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant.” He acquired the Leica camera with 50 mm lens in Marseilles that would accompany him for many years. He described the Leica as an extension of his eye. The anonymity that the small camera gave him in a crowd or during an intimate moment was essential in overcoming the formal and unnatural behavior of those who were aware of being photographed. He enhanced his anonymity by painting all shiny parts of the Leica with black paint. The Leica opened up new possibilities in photography—the ability to capture the world in its actual state of movement and transformation.

italy, 1938

It’s a rule of the game of photographic hide-and-seek that he who sees first wins, but with them you lose if you’re unfortunate enough to stop for a fraction of a second. It’s really difficult to catch them by surprise, especially because of one small detail that I had quickly forgotten myself: I’m a white man. It reached a point when one day I called my interpreter over: ‘Yu, come and see!’ And along with the other Chinese from all around, I stared straight at a Soviet. For once I was not the center of attention, and I was able to take my photos ‘freely.’ ¶ He had the eye, but he took a mischievous pleasure in turning his critical gaze on everything that did not meet the eye. He liked to focus on the unpredictable, to bring something unexpected into the routines.

The man who loved to merge into the crowd and to be as quiet as his Leica could not avoid drawing attention to himself simply by his very presence. Such a situation required a change of tactics. His actual movements were a disturbance, and rarely fitted in with the specific atmosphere. When he was in Wuhan, the cultural delegate always very considerate warned him that it was not the done thing to photograph passers-by without their permission. Cartier-Bresson therefore had to learn about Chinese etiquette. He was not prevented from taking certain photos, but then was politely asked to take others. Sometimes he had to perform a tricky sidestep in his desire to establish a parallel between the vestiges of the past and the outlines of the future.

greece, 1953

He himself, was always extremely reluctant with regard to a historicist approach which would situate each photograph in its professional, artistic and social context and would replace the photographer’s inner necessity with a superego of practice, craft and visual memory that, for the fact of being masked, would come back to the fore with insistence. Such an approach to the works would necessarily bring out at once similarities, references, and, even more, discontinuities from one period to another. And this could be interpreted as the sign of inconsistency, or infidelity, to the intuitive principles which he had always been wanting to be exclusive.

There were what he called the ‘singles’. They show just how much Cartier-Bresson was concerned with preserving what he considered the best of his output from the 1930s. At the same time, and in an equally symbolic gesture, he hid his Leica by burying it: faced with multiple uncertainties, Cartier-Bresson thought about what might survive him and about what he did not want to leave for posterity. He irreversibly inaugurated the construction of the corpus to be remembered and revealed the consciousness of a coherence in the work of the 1930s. ¶ Modern photography in that period, might be defined as one of free expression, of aimless wandering: it consisted of strolling around the cities and identifying situations, figure compositions, details, incongruous associations which, isolated within the frame of the photograph and cut off from the context and what was off-camera, made a banal reality suddenly transform itself into enigmatic suspense. Something seems to be happening in the image but it is the viewer’s imagination which starts to float, to hesitate, while capturing reminiscences, undefined echoes.

Photography is an immediate operation performed by the senses and the mind; it is the world translated into visual terms, simultaneously a ceaseless quest and interrogation. It is, at one and the same moment, the awareness of a fact in a fraction of a second and the strict organization of visually perceived forms expressing and signifying this fact. The main thing is to be on an equal footing with the reality that we are dividing up in the viewfinder. The camera is in some ways a sketchbook drawn in time and space, and it is also an admirable instrument that seizes life just as it presents itself.

the instant which , in visual terms , questions and decides simultaneously .

He believed in composing his photographs in the viewfinder. He sim-

ply took them as they came, in his own inimitable manner.

rome, 1959

Any photographer worth his salt is a kind of thief, for no matter what angle you consider it from, any photograph is a kind of theft. You have to shoot without thinking, because the unforeseen will never present itself again. From the exposure of his very first films, CartierBresson was immediately aware that he was committing an act of violence as soon as he incorporated human beings and not just nature or the inanimate world of objects. What would a passer-by think if the photographer pointed his Leica at him? You could be as discreet, as rapid and as charming as you liked, but this aggressive Cyclops eye would strip the subject naked in his intimate moments.

His ability to be invisible now came into play. Obsessed by the image, he was also gripped by the idea of disappearing, which in some sense is just another way of appearing. Many photographers seize the slightest opportunity to indulge in the ritual of self-portraiture, but Cartier-Bresson allowed himself to do so only once—he took off his shoes, took a photograph with his right foot standing out against a background of trees and foliage. ¶ ‘Take the route of my foot,’ the blacks had told him before they went into the African forest. There is something delightfully impudent and innocently mischievous about the photograph of a toe.

The geometrician was evident from the first photographs that he took in Marseilles in 1932, most notably in the lanky bourgeois figure in cape and bowler hat, striking because of the mysterious aura surrounding him; he stands, quietly majestic, at the very centre of the perfect perspective formed by two lines of bare trees whose vanishing point falls exactly at the end of the avenue du Prado. ¶ The surrealist in him gave free rein to a kind of visual automatic writing. His urban fantasy was worthy of the best pages in Nadja. Sometimes it was objects held in affection by his friends at the Cafe de la Dame Blanche that presented themselves to his lens. Thus he photographed Leonor Fini—a woman passionate about the theatricality of life, hostile to the frozen moment of the snapshot, willing to take off her clothes because nothing is more revealing than such a pose—when she was playing in the street with tailor’s dummies. Such dummies, made of wax or wood or wicker, are often to be seen in De Chirico’s paintings, as well as in Breton’s arsenal of symbols, and before these, in some of atget’s snapshots. These artists’ decapitated mannequins, like their animal skins and their wrapped objects, demonstrate the eye’s ability to make something extraordinary out of the ordinary, to exalt the strangeness inherent in the banal.

As a witness, unlike so many others, he fought shy of giving testimony. As an acrobat, he skillfully avoided the traps set for those with eyes to see, and took each metaphor as it came.

As an analyst, he had a way of seizing on coincidence to demonstrate that the roots of the image are in the unconscious.

When it was not objects, it was allegories that stimulated Cartier-Bressonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s surrealist streak: reflections of the busy port and the swarming crowds in the window of a sunlit Marseilles bistro; the painted mask of a solitary man resolutely turning his eyes away from a bad colour print; evoking the joys of married life in the corner of a window in Budapest; everywhere people asleep, and always this slightly unreal slant that enables one single element to lift a scene into the realms of the irrational.

As an animal, Cartier-Bresson was a predator, for he had the charismatic power and the will to destroy in order to defend his territoryÂâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; but no more than that, for his prey never became his victim.

What about techniques? In his eyes, it didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t matter, or at least he didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to talk about it. He preferred to talk about style: not about humanism, social fantasy or poetic realism, with which interpreters have tried to categorize him, nor about the grammar of the image, the geometry of the vision, but about the spiritual movement which encompasses all these. And he would talk about his Leica, his third eye, his instinct for a shot, his taste for the sharp image, his art of living. Âś Technique enabled Cartier-Bresson to find pose and balance; a chaotic content disclosed the grace of form. He may well have been the greatest photographer of all. And his silences had quality, in complete harmony with the infinite discretion of his Leica at the moment of shooting.

france ,

1932

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotiv.

The perfect shot does not take place at the opportune moment, because you do not detach yourself from yourself. You do not exert your strength towards the accomplishment but you anticipate your failure…. The true art is without aim, without intention…. Liberate yourself from yourself, leave behind everything that you are, everything that you have, so that nothing at all is left of you except the tension without the aim. ¶ Initially, the photographer in Cartier-Bresson was deeply impressed by Herrigel, but when he had read the book several times his whole vision of the world changed. The philosophy of life that came across consisted of immensely complex ideas expressed with an almost disconcerting clarity and simplicity: you must live for the present, because the future moves away like the line of the horizon as you approach it. To be yourself is to be outside yourself. By aiming at the target there is a chance we will hit ourselves.

The outside world sends us back to ourselves. You must arrive with great force and depart forgetting yourself. Forgetting yourself, abstracting yourself, with nothing more to prove: only when it is no longer a pastime but a means of life and death does archery become an artless art, and then the archer, in conflict with himself, is both Master and non-Master, since he is mentally capable of hitting his target without bow or arrow. Cartier-Bresson would remember all this when he eventually came to finalize his own concept of photography. ¶ I attach great importance to there being no changes to my compositions; refer to my proofs in the album for this; if they are missing, print the negatives in their entirety without cropping even a millimeter during either enlargement or printing. Do not use margins, because they all encroach—even if only infinitesimally—on the image projected by the negative.

there is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment .

s e v i l l e , s pa i n

1933

a b ov e a l l i l o o k f o r a n i n n e r s i l e n c e . i s e e k to t r a n s l at e t h e p e r s o na l i t y a n d n ot a n e x p r e s s i o n .

the depth

an inner silence

london, 1937

But the most difficult thing for me is not street photography. It’s a portrait. The difference between a portrait and a snapshot is that in a portrait, a person agreed to be photographed. But certainly it’s like a biologist and his microscope. When you study the thing, it doesn’t react as when it’s not studied. And you have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt, which is not an easy thing, because you steal something. The strange thing is that you see people naked through your viewfinder. And it’s sometimes very embarrassing. 2 I’m always nervous when I go to take a portrait, because it’s a new experience. Usually when taking a portrait, I feel like putting a few questions just to get the reaction of a person. It’s difficult to talk at the same time that you observe with intensity the face of somebody. But still, you must establish a contact of some sort. Whereas with Ezra Pound, I stood in front of him for maybe an hour and a half in utter silence. We were looking at each other in the eye. He was rubbing his fingers. I took maybe altogether one good photograph, four other possible, and two which were not interesting. That makes about six pictures in an hour and a half. And no embarrassment on either side.

I’m always nervous when I go to take a portrait, because it’s a new experience. Usually when taking a portrait, I feel like putting a few questions just to get the reaction of a person. It’s difficult to talk at the same time that you observe with intensity the face of somebody. But still, you must establish a contact of some sort. Whereas with Ezra Pound, I stood in front of him for maybe an hour and a half in utter silence. We were looking at each other in the eye. He was rubbing his fingers. I took maybe altogether one good photograph, four other possible, and two which were not interesting. That makes about six pictures in an hour and a half. And no embarrassment on either side.

Despite the black and white, and the details and attitudes typical of the different periods, there is nothing dated about the photographs—nothing, at any rate, that prevents past and present merging in them. CartierBresson rightly maintained that some of his photographs remained current because they were not taken in a rear-view mirror. In other words, they are timeless; they detach themselves from their temporal context, they give permanence to the fleetingness of humanity. There is no other means of expression that can claim to fix the transient precisely as it was. ¶ It is the soul that makes all the difference. And so he was against the concept of photographic schools: you don’t teach walking, looking, seeing, and you can’t teach instinct or discipline. There are some photographs of landscapes that are disarming in their sober simplicity, and you might think that they could have been taken by anybody, but look closer and you will see that they all contain a detail that takes them on to a higher plane, into the zone of the timeless.

He spent his days, Leica in hand, on the lookout for humanity in all its strangest manifestations, in the Merced market or at the Cuadrante de la Soledad. The expressions that he captures showed deep solitude, the disenchantment of the deprived, the apathy of people resigned to inescapable poverty. When he tore himself away from these haunting expressions, revealed in the little makeshift laboratory he had installed in his room, it was only to go out into the streets again to see the same sights. His mind was filled with people and objects, forms and emotions, the Mexican pathos that never left him in peace, though it was not in his nature anyway to close his eyes. It was impossible not to be seduced by a country whose artists had resurrected the spirit of Giottoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s frescoes (but more social, more political, and clearly more pre-Columbian) on the walls of their own monuments. There was no need to go to the museums to admire the works of these pioneers of the Mexican art renaissance. The muralists worked everywhere in the city.

A sharp profile and a very mobile gaze behind he lenses of his spectacles, he looks like a shy and studious schoolboy on prizegiving day, an only son who has grown up too quickly and will always look on the world with the eyes of a wonder-struck child, while possessing all the experience of a man.

as a par ticipant , he gazes tenta tively into the soul .

Today crowds are returning to art by way of photography. With the passionate movements of children at play. With the poses of men caught unawares in heir sleep. With the unconscious twitches of people strolling by. The heterogeneous diversities of the human beings who succeed one another in the streets of our towns. Yet the photos of Cartier-Bresson, his art, which is opposed to that of the relatively peaceful, post-war period, is the art of the period of wars and revolutions in which we are living, at the moment when its rhythm is quickening.

‘Are you going to take some photos?’ ‘No, but I never leave my Leica behind.’ Only such total dedication and permanent readiness can allow for the decisive moment, which otherwise might disappear for ever. ¶ The reportage is a progressive operation performed by the head, eye, and heart in order to express a problem, fix an event or impressions…. For me photography is simultaneous recognition, in a instant, of part of the significance of a fact, and on the other hand rigorous organization of the visually perceived forms that express this fact….

We can characterise this formula of a significant shot with a term which Cartier-Bresson himself proposed: condensation, when he insisted, relative to the photo-reportage, that he was ‘looking instead for the unique photo, in other words: condensation’. I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to “trap life”—to preserve life in the act of living. Above all, I craved to seize, in the confines of one single photograph, the whole essence of some situation that was in the process of unfolding itself before my eyes. That essence, was we shall see, is immediately recognizable in a geometry of rhythms. Cartier-Bresson also suggests the idea of a simultaneous coalition: ‘Photography implies the recognition of a rhythm in the world of real things…. In a photograph, composition is the result of a simultaneous coalition, the organic coordination of elements seen by the eye’.

As an observer, he followed Baudelaire, a prince moving everywhere incognito. As a participant in the dramas of history, he gazed tentatively into the soul.

There is nothing in the world that does not have its decisive moment, and the masterpiece of good conduct is to recognize and seize the moment. If you miss it in the revolution of states, you run the risk of not finding it again or of not perceiving it. ¶ Everything in this preface—the didactic tone, the choice of words, the sporting metaphors—reveals his mental approach. After this very grand siécle epigraph, the beginning has a somewhat Proustian flavour: ‘I have always had a passion for painting. When I was a child, I did it on Thursdays and Sundays, and I dreamed about it on the other days. I had a Box Brownie, like many children…’. ¶ After a short autobiography, he develops his ideas in six directions: reportage, subject, composition, colour, technique and client. In addition to his well-known obsession with form and his professional principles, which he applied to his private life, we find here his taste for the well crafted, disciplined formula—all the more effective because to the very last Cartier-Bresson resists intellectualizing the activity which is his life and his livelihood, even though it too is a kind of mental exercise. Because this preface is the only major theoretical text that he ever agreed to write, certain passages have been quoted over and over again. It is a professional’s profession of faith, and with its practical content as well as its deeper reflections it is as much a handbook as a breviary. ¶ Everything in it invites us to contemplate the ineffable elements of such a strange human activity, a kind of poetry, with its close links both to time and to death. The decisive moment appears here as an extraordinary confluence of reality and sightline, issuing from the ideal of purity that we retain from childhood and project to memories of that childhood.

the camera for us is a tool , not a pretty mechan ical toy . Your eye must see a composition life itself offers you, and you must know when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. 55

COLOPHON

DECISIVE MOMENT This book was produced in the class of Typography 3 under the instruction by Ariel Grey in Academy of Art University at San Francisco, California. All photographs used are by Henri Cartier-Bresson. The typefaces used are swiss 721 by Max Miedinger for headings/ captions, and sabon by Jan Tschichold for body texts. This book is printed on e p s on premi um pres entati on matte paper. Book designed, printed and bound by Elaine Lai.