100 PHOTOGRAPHS 99
BEHIND THE GARE SAINT-LAZARE by Henri Cartier-Bresson
Speed and instinct were at the heart of Henri Cartier-
Bresson’s brilliance as a photographer. And never did he
combine the two better than on the day in 1932 when he
pointed his Leica camera through a fence behind Paris’
Saint-Lazare train station. The resulting image is a mas-
terpiece of form and light. As a man leaps across the water,
evoking the dancers in a poster on the wall behind him, the
ripples in the puddle around the ladder mimic the curved
metal pieces nearby. Cartier-Bresson, shooting with a nim-
ble 35-millimeter camera and no flash, saw these compo-
nents all come together for a brief moment and clicked his
shutter. Timing is everything, and no other photographer’s
was better. The image would become the quintessential ex-
ample of Cartier-Bresson’s “Decisive Moment,” his lyrical
term for the ability to immortalize a fleeting scene on film.
It was a fast, mobile, detail-obsessed style that would help
chart the course for all of modern photography.