Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/09/22
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Eric wrote, with his usual mixture of wit and charm, so disarming in its erudition that it borders on the absurd: > What do you mean? What is the original French title, and what does it mean, > exactly. Considering the talk for years before and after that using that > very word - Decisive - and long treatises on the subject, this comment > seems to me to border on the absurd. The original title, as others have mentioned, is 'Images a la sauvette'. As usual there are lots of possible ways to translate it, none of them as absurd as 'THE DECISIVE MOMENT'. Off the top of my head: Images on the run Fugitive Images Images on the fly Images in a hurry Fleeting Images Glances In fact, perhaps the best English translation would be (and this is what I call my portfolio of US pictures) 'Very Quick on the Eye'. Hands off! It's mine! The point is, IMAGES A LA SAUVETTE has no sense of 'decision' in it, but reflects, IMHO, the true nature of HCB's work as a kind of supercondensed snapshot in which geometric relations between people and things snap into a kind of perfect but unstable equilibrium... a stasis, where things just hang there, like a marble perfectly balance on the top of an upturned wok, which won't be there the next time you look back. I don't know where 'The Decisive Moment' comes from but it sounds like one of those snappy titles editors come up with... the easy familiarity of a cliche, like CUTTING EDGE or INSIDE STORY or STREET LEGAL or any one of a thousand documentary TV shows which promise, but rarely deliver, an insight into the real world. Titles like these are easy to write essays about, but doesn't, for me, capture the essence of HCB's work which he himself described as 'antigraphic' photography in his first US exhibition. I've thought this 'absurd' thought for years, but was very pleased to read Colin Westerbeck's essay on HCB in BYSTANDER, in which he says: "THE DECISIVE MOMENT is misleading as a translation, for the moment referred to is that just before a decision is made, the moment of aniticipation rather than conclusion... the instant being described is the one when you are just about to take off, the point at which the shortstop is ready to dash in any direction as he watches the batter step into the ball, or when th epickpocket waits for his victim to be distracted so that he can strike". And now back to arguments about the number of angels, or child abusers, on the head of a pin. - -- Johnny Deadman "You can straighten a worm, but the crook is in him and only waiting" - Mark Twain