Eugène Atget’s sedate photographs of Paris, which prompted him to try
a slow plate camera and tripod: ‘instead of a shutter a lens cap’, which
‘confined my challenge to the static world’. The most celebrated spread
from his book makes a comparable switch in tempo. On the left, a man
is frozen in mid-air as he jumps over a puddle, his heel almost touching
its reflection; on the right, an older man, solid on his feet, pauses as if
reflecting upon a decisive moment in his past. The first jumps quickly
through his sleepy surroundings; the second is almost as still as his. The
first photo looks like a decisive snapshot because we can see the arresting
effect of the fast shutter. The second looks calmer because the scene is
calmer. In reality, both might have been shot the same way, with the
26 same shutter speeds, but a photograph tends to look ‘decisive’ if there is
17 Page spread fromThe Decisive Moment
(New York and Paris, 1952).
