Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/03/20
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]On 3/20/02 5:22 PM, "BOB KRAMER" <BobKramer@COOPERCARRY.com> wrote: >> Interesting, isn't it, >> that he didn't coin the phrase "The Decisive MomentS," or >> "The Decisive Five >> Minutes," or the "Decisive Image." It's "THE decisive >> MOMENT." And it is a >> bit of a crock. > > Not a crock at all. Just a phrase that, to him, summed up what made his art > great. A frozen moment in time that couldn't swing one way or the other > without losing the essence of the image. He may have spent several moments > (seconds or minutes, whatever) working a potential image, but in the final > analysis, it is the ONE moment that works... that makes the ONE image a > great photograph. Well the last time I looked HCB was French. The French title of the book in question, Images a la Sauvette, is much harder to translate than you would think. Rather than 'the decisive moment' it translates to something like 'images on the fly' or 'fleeting moments' or, how I personally would translate it, 'very quick on the eye'. The point is that 'the decisive moment' is more of a snappy photo-editor's title and points towards the photojournalistic technique of capturing the height of the action -- the moment when Jack shot Lee Harvey or the ball was poised over the hoop. There is a lot more to HCB's particular technique than this. His schtick has been endlessly deconstructed on the streetphoto list as you can imagine but what emerges as a kind of consensus is that he is very formally preoccupied, in the sense of an overwhelming awareness of the graphic content of an image. So many classic HCB shots are about the kind of graphic balance that a kandinsky or a paul klee painting achieves, perhaps not surprising as they are his near contemporaries and he is a painter. They are particularly charming because very often because of the fleeting nature of his subject matter, that balance could only momentarily have been achieved, and even then only from his particular vantage, and it was then gone for ever. I think this gets a lot closer to the art of the decisive moment then it just being a question of clicking the shutter at the right point in time. The interesting thing about looking at his pictures this way is that it then becomes possible that the universe contains an infinity of such moments, and that photographers are a kind of butterfly collector, swinging their leica-manufactured nets around in the hopes of snagging new species and pinning them to the negative. Hopefully without destroying the life in them. - -- John Brownlow http://www.pinkheadedbug.com - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html