Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/08/15
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]I would submit that "decisive moment" has in this passage been emptied of any significant meaning. If I understand Bresson correctly, "decisive" is in his usage bi-valent. It means on one hand the "moment" in which a set of circumstances/subjects converge to present the photographer with a sort of aesthetic *mis en place*--the constituents of a moment freighted with potential significance and, on the other, the photographers *decision* to capture it as a conscious expression of his or her vision--a triumph, as it were, of the artistic will. Photographers *make* photographs; they don't *record* them. The fellow whose advice appears below could as easily mount a high res. digital camera--or a series of them--say, on a ball court, *tape* the whole bloody game, and then survey the footage until he finds a frame (scene) that best exemplifies his notion of an "important" moment. Technology permitting, what's to stop one from moving directly to print with that image. Are we comfortable with the notion that this represents "photography" as we understand it. When does a 35mm cease being a still camera and become, instead, a cine camera--how many FPS before we all become cinematographers? It bothers me considerably to see this debasing of a useful way to think about our art/craft. One must grant the need for visual *reportage*, but I'm not sure that Bresson would recognize the sentiment below as 'photographic' in its sensibility. Chandos At 01:39 PM 8/15/1999 -0700, you wrote: >Robert Stevens wrote: > > > > Ted: > ><snip> If you press the shutter just prior to the decisive > > moment and capture it, the few frames after that will be past it. If you > > just hold down the button hoping to capture the decisive moment, you will > > probably miss it because at six frames per second, the exposures are too > > far apart. He later started using a high speed Canon F1 which does 15fps > > and he says if he presses the shutter at the right time, he may get two > > good shots of the decisive moment. After attending his seminar, I tried my > ><snip> Chandos Michael Brown Assoc. Prof., History and American Studies College of William and Mary http://www.wm.edu/CAS/ASP/faculty/brown