Photography and Cinema

something to arrest. This is photography of the lens and shutter actively

combined, colliding and colluding with the world in motion. The frame

cuts into space and the shutter cuts into time, turning the photographic

act into an event in itself.^4

Cartier-Bresson’s compact Leica camera, so vital to the development

of mobile reportage, took 35 mm stock made standard by the film indus-

try. Indeed, the Leica was in part designed to enable cinematographers

to make exposure tests on short lengths of ciné film, without having to

thread up a bulky movie camera. So while photography may have begat

cinema, cinema begat the ‘decisive moment’. This is true in more than

a technical sense. Stillness became definitive of photography only in

the shadow of the cinema. Specialists like Muybridge and Marey had

pursued instantaneous photography since the 1870 s, but thewidespread

desire for the precise freezing of action took hold in the era of ‘moving

pictures’, which had themselves taken hold in the era of modern metro-

politan motion. Likewise, the term ‘snapshot’ dates back to the 1860 s,

when the instantaneous photo became possible, but it was not until the

1920 s that the snapshot was professionalized via reportage and democra-

tized via amateurism. It was then that it came to be understood as the

very essence of photography, for a while at least. It was almost as if

cinema, in colonizing the popular understanding of time, implied that

life itself was made up of distinct slices and that still photography had

the potential to seize and extract them.^5

Cartier-Bresson’s most celebrated photographs are of everyday

situations made eventful only by his precise framing and timing. The

subject matter is often insignificant until it is photographed – the jump-

ing over a puddle, the fleeting gesture of a face, bodies moving through

space flattened suddenly and beautifully into two dimensions. He was

present at a great number of historical events, but he was indirect, shoot-

ing bystanders rather than the main attraction, the diffused effects rather

than the cause. Best when conjured out of next to nothing,hisdecisive

moments avoided competition with history’s decisive moments. The

exception is the photograph titled ‘A Gestapo informer recognized by

a woman she had denounced, deportation camp, Dessau, Germany, 1945 ’.

Here the image is a decisive event, but it is alsoofan event, a momentary 27