The changing meaning of
“The Decisive Moment”
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Summary: What is this page about?
For almost three-quarters of a century, the idea of “the decisive moment” has held almost mythical status in the imagination of many photographers around the world.
The term was coined as a title for the 1952 English edition of French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’s book Images à la sauvette.
Since that book’s publication, street photographers in particular have often seen capturing “the decisive moment” as a personal challenge.
But times have changed, and TTG’s allowance for combining exposures reflects redefinitions of the terms “decisive” and “moment.”
This page explores how both the realities and the expectations surrounding “the decisive moment” have changed in the 21st century.
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1. The photographer no longer needs great reflexes or a honed sense of anticipation
Digital cameras and smartphones can take a quick succession of photos.
In fact, it is now possible to silently shoot — from waist level, without needing to hold the camera up to the eye — 30 frames per second.
All a photographer has to do when trying to capture “the decisive moment” is crank up the frame rate, mash the shutter for a couple of seconds, and then choose a “best” from all of the resulting photographs.
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2. The photographer doesn’t know until later which moment was “decisive.”
This is already a reality (see the last paragraph of #1 above).
But it will boom exponentially as more and more eyeglasses and sunglasses have cameras built into them.
With that kind of eyewear, whatever the photographer looks at can be photographed, with no camera or device in hand, and with no awareness on the part of the subject that they are being photographed.
There will of course be enormous “social” consequences of such eyewear; it could change interpersonal relations as much as anything since the origin of language.
On an individual level, that eyewear will mean that a “decisive moment” photographer can spend the day walking around, constantly taking pictures of people — all without the knowledge of the people in those pictures — and later go through thousands of photographs, saving only the few frames that fill the goal of showing a “decisive moment.”
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3. The term “decisive” increasingly refers to the subject’s action, not the photographer’s.
The term “decisive” when applied to photography was sometimes embraced by photographers to describe what they hoped to do—
—that is, to have the skill to capture that one perfect moment using a camera that could only take a photograph once every second or so.
But because of #1 and #2 above, the term increasingly refers to what the subject was doing, not what the photographer is doing.
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4. That “moment” depicted in the photograph may actually be a combination of photos.
This development is the result of recent smartphone camera technologies: multiple exposures can be recorded in very quick succession (usually without the photographer’s awareness) and then combined to produce what appears to be a single-exposure photograph.
So while it may be heresy to a 20th-century street photographer who hunted for “the decisive moment” in the sense of “a single exposure,” in the 21st century many photographs described by that term will actually be a combination of exposures processed to look like only one exposure.
See also #1502
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5. What is lost? What is gained?
Many photographers might say that something valuable has been permanently lost, both in terms of the thrill of the pursuit and in terms of the sense of achievement.
Unless a photographer shoots with a non-motorized film camera, the historic quest to deliberately capture “the decisive moment” will never again have the risks, stakes, and rewards that it once had.
But for viewers who appreciate seeing as many photographs as possible of “decisive moments” — records of the critical instant when the moving elements in a scene are in their most compelling arrangement — the future looks bright indeed.