The Decisive Moment by Henri Cartier-Bresson
“There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment” Cardinal de Retz
I have always felt a passion for painting. As a child, I painted on Thursdays and Sundays, and on other days I dreamed of painting. I had a Brownie camera like many children, but I only used it occasionally to fill small albums with my holiday memories. It was much later that I began to learn to look through the device; my little world widened and holiday photographs contributed to that purpose.
There was also cinema, The Mysteries of New York, with Pearl White, the great Griffith films, Broken Lilies, the early Stroheim films, Greed, the Eisenstein ones, The Battleship Potemkin, then Joan of Arc by Dreyer; they taught me to see. Later, I met some photographers who had Atget proofs; they impressed me greatly. Then I bought a tripod, a black veil, a 9 x 12 walnut-coated device, equipped with a lens cap that served as a shutter; this allowed me to confront only what did not move. The other subjects were too complicated or seemed too amateur; in this way I believed I was dedicating myself to “Art.” I developed and printed the negatives myself in a bucket and that bricolage amused me. I barely noticed when the papers were too contrasted or, on the contrary, muted; but the truth is I did not care at all, even though I would get angry when the images did not turn out.
In 1931, at twenty‑two, I left for Africa. In Ivory Coast I bought a camera, but until the return, after a year, I did not realize it was full of mold; all the photos came out over‑exposed with tree ferns. Since I was very ill then, I devoted my time to healing; a small monthly fee allowed me to keep taking pictures, I worked happily and for pleasure. I had discovered the Leica: it became the extension of my eye and it never left me again. I walked all day with a tense spirit, looking for the opportunity to take photographs of nature as if they were blatant crimes. I was especially inspired by the desire to capture in a single image the essential that emerged from a scene. Doing photo‑reportages, that is, telling a story in several photos, was an idea that had never occurred to me; later, I learned, little by little, to do a reportage by observing the work of my friends and the illustrated magazines, for which I began to work.
I circulated a lot, even though I do not know how to travel. I like to do it slowly, paying attention to the changes between countries. As soon as I arrive, I always feel the desire to settle there to live the country’s life, as much as possible. I would not serve as a globe‑trotter.
With five other independent photographers we founded in 1947 our cooperative, Magnum Photos, which disseminates our photo‑reportages through French and foreign magazines. I remain an amateur, but I have stopped being a dilettante.
The Reportage
What does a photo‑reportage consist of? Sometimes a single photo whose form has enough rigor and richness, and whose content has enough resonance, can suffice; but that happens very rarely; the elements of the subject that spark the spark are often scattered; one does not have the right to force them together, staging them would be a falsehood: that is why the reportage is useful; the page will bring together those complementary elements spread across several photos.
The reportage is a progressive operation of the mind, the eye and the heart to express a problem, to fix an event or loose impressions. An event has such richness that one keeps turning it while it develops. The solution is sought. Sometimes it is found after a few seconds, other times it takes hours or days; there is no standard solution; there are no recipes, one must be prepared as in tennis. Reality offers such abundance that one must cut from the natural, simplify, although does one always cut what should be? One must acquire, through one’s own work, the awareness of what one does. Sometimes, one feels that one has taken the strongest photograph and yet one continues photographing, unable to foresee with certainty how the event will develop. Meanwhile, we will avoid shooting in a rush and mechanically, so as not to overload with useless sketches that cloud memory and harm the clarity of the whole.
Memory is very important, the memory of each photograph that, at the gallop, we have taken at the same pace as the event; during the work we must be sure we have not left holes, that we have expressed everything, because later it will be too late, we will not be able to recover the event in reverse.
For us, there are therefore two selections and, therefore, two possible reproaches; one when we face reality with the viewfinder, another, when the images are developed and fixed and one sees oneself obliged to separate those that, although fair, are also the weakest. When it is too late, one knows exactly why one failed. Often, during the work, a doubt, a physical rupture with the event creates the feeling that one has not taken into account such detail in the whole; other times, quite often, the eye has let itself go with indolence, the gaze has become vague. That is enough.
In each of us it is our eye that opens the space that expands until infinity, a present space that impresses us with greater or lesser intensity and that will quickly be locked in our memories and will be modified in them. Of all means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes the precise instant. We play with things that disappear and that, once gone, cannot be revived. One cannot retouch the subject; at most one can make a selection of images for the presentation of the reportage. The writer has time to reflect before the word takes shape, before putting it on paper; he can link several elements. There is a period when the brain forgets, a settling phase. For us, what disappears, disappears forever: that is why we are anxious and also the essential originality of our profession. We cannot redo our work once we have returned to the hotel. Our task is to observe reality with the help of that sketchbook that is our camera; to fix reality but not manipulate it, neither during the shoot nor in the lab playing with tricks. Whoever has an eye repairs easily those tricks.
In a photo‑reportage one counts the shots, a bit like a referee and, unfortunately, becomes an intruder. It is therefore necessary to approach the subject on tiptoe, even if it is a still life. Stealthy as a cat, but watchful eye. Without mishaps, “without raising the hare.” Naturally, no magnesium photos, out of respect for light, even if absent. Otherwise, the photographer becomes an unbearably aggressive being. This profession depends as much on the relationships we establish with people, that a word can ruin everything, and make all doors close. There is no single system here either, the best you can do is to forget, the photographer and the camera that is always too visible. Reactions are very different depending on the country and the medium; in the East, an impatient or hurried photographer becomes ridiculous, which is irreparable. If we ever are defeated by haste, or someone has repaired your camera, just forget the photograph and kindly let the children gather around you.
The Subject
How to deny the subject? It is imposed. And since there are subjects both in what happens in the world and in our personal universe, it is enough to be lucid about what happens and honest about what one feels. In short, it is enough to position oneself in relation to what is perceived.
The subject does not consist in collecting facts, since facts by themselves do not offer any interest. The important thing is to choose among them; capture the true fact in relation to the deep reality.
In photography, the smallest thing can constitute a great subject, a small human detail becoming a leitmotif. We see, and make see, in this kind of testimony, the world around us, and it is the event, from its very function, that provokes the organic rhythm of forms.
As for the way of expressing oneself, there are a thousand and one ways to distill what has seduced us. Let us then leave the ineffable all its freshness, and never speak of it again…
There is a territory that painting no longer explodes, portrait, and some say that photography is the cause of it; in any case, photography has recovered it in part, in the form of illustrations. But we should not blame photography for the fact that painters have abandoned one of their great subjects.
The levita, the quepis, the horse repel at this moment the most academic of painters who will feel strangled by all the buttons of Meissonier’s cuffs. We accept them, perhaps because our work is less permanent than that of painters; why should they bother us? Rather they amuse us, since, through our camera, we accept life in all its reality. People long to perpetuate themselves in their portrait and lean their profile toward posterity; this desire is often intertwined with a certain magical fear: this desire justifies us.
One of the most emotional aspects of portraits is trying to find similarities between the men represented, to find continuity elements in everything that describes their medium; in a family album, confusing the uncle with the nephew. But if the photographer can capture the reflection of a world, both exterior and interior, it is because people are “in situation”, as it is usually said in theatrical language. The photographer, therefore, must respect the environment, integrate the habitat that describes the medium, avoid above all the artifice that kills human truth and achieve, also, that the camera and the one who manipulates it is forgotten. The complicated material and the projectors prevent, in my opinion, the “bird from coming out”. Is there anything more fleeting than an expression on a face? The first impression that face gives is very fair, and while it is enriched as we frequent the person, it becomes increasingly difficult to express its deep nature as we acquire a more intimate knowledge of it. I consider it quite dangerous to be a portraitist when working on commission for certain clients because, apart from some patrons, everyone wants to be favored, and the traces of the true are lost. Clients distrust the objectivity of the camera while the photographer seeks psychological sharpness; the encounter between these two reflections makes a certain kinship arise among all portraits of the same photographer: a similarity that arises from the relationship established between the portrayed people and the photographer’s psychological structure. Harmony is found in the search for balance through the asymmetry of each face, which avoids both excessive softness and the grotesque.
In the artifice of certain portraits, I prefer, with much, those small identity photographs that are squeezed, one against the other, in the showrooms of studio photographers. There is always the possibility of discovering in these faces a documentary identity, lacking the poetic identification one would expect.
Composition
For a subject to have all its identity, the relationships of form must be rigorously established. One must place the camera in space in relation to the object, and that is where the great mastery of composition begins. Photography is, for me, the recognition in reality of a rhythm of surfaces, lines or values; the eye cuts the subject and the camera has nothing else to do but do its job, which consists in printing on film the eye’s decision. A photo is seen in its entirety, at once as a painting; composition is, in it, a simultaneous coalition, the organic coordination of visual elements. It is not composed freely, it is precise, from the outset, one must have the need for it and one cannot separate the background from the form. In photography, there is a new plasticity, a function of instant lines; we work in motion, a kind of intuition of life, and photography must capture in motion the expressive balance.
Our eye must constantly measure, evaluate. We modify perspectives with a slight flex of the knees, we create line coincidences with a simple shift of the head a fraction of a millimetre, but all this, which can only be done with the speed of a reflex, saves us, fortunately, the pretension of making “Art”. It is composed almost at the same time as the shutter is pressed and, by placing the camera more or less far from the subject, we draw the detail, subordinate it, or, on the contrary, let ourselves be drawn by it. Sometimes, dissatisfied, we are trapped, waiting for something to happen; sometimes everything breaks and there will be no photo, but if, for example, suddenly someone crosses that space, we follow their trajectory through the viewfinder, we expect, we shoot, and we leave with the feeling of having obtained something. Later, we can entertain ourselves by drawing only the part that seems most important, giving priority to the page’s unity, and what usually happens is that this destroys the composition conceived by the photographer…; although, in the end, it is the layout artist we owe the recognition of a good presentation, in which documents are framed with margins in the proper spaces, and in which each page, with its architecture and rhythm, expresses the story well as conceived.
In short, the last anxiety of the photographer is before the moment when he flips through the magazine and discovers his reportage…
I have extended myself on a single aspect of photography, but it is evident that there are many others, from catalog advertising photographs to the moving images that become yellowish in a portfolio over time. I did not intend, therefore, to treat photography here from a general point of view.
For me a photograph is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, by one part of the meaning of an event and, on the other, by a rigorous organization of the perceived visual forms that express that event.
Living is how we discover ourselves, while discovering the outside world; this world gives us shape, but we can also act on it. A balance must be established between those two worlds, the interior and the exterior that, in constant dialogue, form one, and that is the world we must communicate.
But all this only refers to the content of the image and, for me, content cannot be separated from form; by form I mean a rigorous plastic organization that, only, makes our concepts and emotions concrete and transmissible. In photography, this visual organization cannot be more than the fruit of an spontaneous feeling of plastic rhythms.
1952
Photography and Color
(PS, 2 December 1985)
Color, in photography, is based on an elemental prism and, for now, this cannot be otherwise, since no chemical procedures have been found that allow the decomposition and recomposition of color due to its complexity (in pastels, for example, the green range has 375 shades!).
For me, color is a very important medium of information, although reproduction is limited by chemistry and cannot be transcendental, it must be intuitive as in painting. Unlike black, whose range is more complex, color offers nothing more than a completely fragmentary range.