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(September 1983): 174.THE DECISIVE MOMENT
Unlike many terms in the history of photography,
the decisive moment has a clear definition and a
precise origin. Most surprising is that the coining of
the term occurred so late. It comes from the enor-
mously influential book by Henri Cartier-Bresson,
The Decisive Moment, published by Simon and
Schuster in 1952. In the text he defined the term
succinctly thus, ‘‘To me, photography is the simul-
taneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of
the significance of an event as well as of a precise
organization of forms which give that event its
proper expression.’’
In a sense, every successful photograph is a decisive
moment, from the first photograph made in 1822,
reportedly a three-day-long exposure, to images
made in the burst of a strobe light in a thousandth
of a second in the 1930s. All are records of a par-
ticular moment in time. But implicit in the definition
is that the photographer is capturing subjects in
motion. Such images have been made since Da-
guerre’s 1842 daguerreotype of a man having his
boots polished on a busy Paris boulevard. By the
1860s, instantaneous photographs were being made
regularly. In the early twentieth century, there were
photographers such as Andre ́Kerte ́sz, active since
1912, who like Cartier-Bresson after him, used a
small handheld camera loaded with fast plates or
sensitive film to capture life on the move and usually
in geometric compositions.
The term became a convenient handle for the kind
of photography that Henri Cartier-Bresson had
been practicing since 1929, which had been called
variously over the years, ‘‘poetic accident,’’ ‘‘anti-
graphic photography,’’ and ‘‘fleeting moments.’’
But in the context of the book filled with Cartier-
Bresson’s own photography there is the further
implication that ‘‘the decisive moment’ is not only
of perfect arrangements of peak moments with a
strong underlying geometry but the final image is
also printed full negative without cropping.
It would be two decades before Henri Cartier-
Bresson would define in writing the type of photo-
graphy that he and his colleagues had been doing all
those years. His work gained notice in the 1930s and
was exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in New
York. The young curator of photography, Beaumont
Newhall, befriended Cartier-Bresson at that time and
later published the first collection of his work in the
catalogue for his exhibition at the Museum of Mod-
ern Art in New York in 1947. Newhall wanted to
publish a book of his friend’s photographs. In a letter
from Beaumont Newhall to Henri Cartier-Bresson
dated 29 October 1949 he wrote,
I am thinking of doing a new book, to be called ‘‘Fleet-
ing Image,’’ which will deal entirely with what you so
aptly call slices of 1/100 of a second.... I would like to
use a good many of your things [photographs] to
develop the thesis.DECARAVA, ROY