RE: [Leica] re: The Decisive Moment is gone

[Tim Atherton <tim@KairosPhoto.com>]

Of course, as has been said before The Decisive Moment never really existed.
The original title of HCB's essay was 'Images a la sauvette', which has
nothing top do with "Decisive Moment" -  the rest I'll leave in the capable
hands of the LUG  archive:

QUOTE: "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
the pickpocket waits for his victim to be distracted so that he can strike".

Johnny Deadman" END QUOTE


tim a

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