Research Point

Watch the Henri Cartier-Bresson documentary ‘L’amour de court’ (‘Just plain love’, 2001) available on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/106009378

Write up your research on the decisive moment in your learning log taking care to give a proper account of the three differing views offered above, and any further research you’ve undertaken independently. What do you feel personally about the decisive moment as a visual strategy, or just as a way to take pictures? Conclude your post with your own perspective on the debate at this point in time.

Whenever you read or watch something, get into the habit of noting down full bibliographic details. If you do this, you won’t have to spend ages hunting for half-remembered references later – and you won’t inadvertently plagiarise someone else’s work. Always use Harvard referencing; print out the study guide on the student website and keep it to hand.

Be very careful about what you put on your blog. Take a moment now to read what the OCA learning blog study guide says about copyright law and fair use or fair dealing.

Thoughts…

The documentary isn’t just about Cartier-Bresson and his photography but also about several other photographers and the work they do. The documentary title translates as ‘Just Plain Love’ and it is that love of image making that comes across from all involved. 

Henri Cartier-Bresson comes across as a very vocal and opinionated person. Someone who was very aware of the world around them. A person who was critical of their own work, to the point that he criticises some of the images that a curator of his work as chosen at one point during the film. 

I also think that he is very grounded in his work. He is very single minded though and knows what he’s looking for.

Watching the documentary I found myself drawn to some of the things that he said when discussing photography. 

“We live in a privileged world, we don’t have to go to far to see”. The current situation has forced us to look at the world around us, we don’t have the freedom to go wherever we want and so have to pay particular attention to things that we might normally have ignored. You don’t have to wander far from your door to find “moments”.

“Its always luck”, “Luck is all that counts”, “If you’re open it will come.” When talking about his photograph Cartier-Bresson says that he didn’t have a clear view of what was happening, he managed to get his lens through the bars but couldn’t frame the image intentionally to get the figure running. Such an important image, an important concept for photographers which comes down to luck and pressing the shutter release at the right time.

In his article, O’Hagan, S. (2014), about Sean O’Hagan says “The decisive moment has come to mean the perfect second to press the shutter.” In 1932, when Henri Cartier-Bresson took this image, there were no digital cameras, just film. Capturing the image was a matter of pressing the button at the right moment. Today, with digital cameras and the ability to set the to capture high speed bursts of images, it isn’t so much a case of pressing the button at the perfect second but being aware that something is about to happen so you can release the shutter and capture a period of time, including the particular moment you are after.

Cartier-Bresson states that for him “Form comes first. Light is like perfume for me” and that is well illustrated by his photograph taken in Hyères, France. Composing the image, getting the shapes right and then waiting for the right light makes this a great image. Having the cyclist come through just at the right moment is luck, although it is possible to have an insight that they are coming through, catching them at the exact moment they were opposite the bottom of the staircase is challenging, and requires a little bit of luck of was it actually staged?

There are so much that we can learn from Henri Cartier-Bresson but the one, really important, thing that we can learn by watching this documentary is when he says:

“You need to learn to love to look. You can’t look at something you don’t love.”

If we can’t look at something because we don’t love it, then how can we expect to capture those Decisive Moments when they happen. We need to be ever-present…just in case!

References

Vimeo. 2021. H. Cartier-Bresson: l’amour tout court. [online] Available at: <https://vimeo.com/106009378&gt; [Accessed 10 September 2021].

Metmuseum.org. 2021. [online] Available at: <https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/286639&gt; [Accessed 10 September 2021].

the Guardian. 2021. Cartier-Bresson’s classic is back – but his Decisive Moment has passed. [online] Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/dec/23/henri-cartier-bresson-the-decisive-moment-reissued-photography&gt; [Accessed 10 September 2021].