My main gripe with HCB is one: when he project to the public the "decisive moment" which later was proven to be a total BS, I question integrity of the person and view his work from a different perspective.
Don't blame Cartier-Bresson for myths about him and his works that aren't of his making. He stated over and over again that it was only the English title of a book. In this 1973 interview, for example:
—
What exactly to you mean by The Decisive Moment, the American title of Images à la sauvette?
— You want to know more about the title? Well, I had nothing to do with it. I found a line in the memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, in which he said: "There is nothing in this world which does not have a decisive moment." I used the quote as an inscription in the French edition, and when we were thinking of titles for the American edition, we had a whole page of possibilities. Suddenly, Dick Simon said: "Why not use 'The Decisive Moment'?"
Not that he didn't believe that there is a moment when the photographer sees within the frame something he likes, that fits into his own sense of the tye of composition he likes. Same interview:
—
Are youy able to define the moment when you press the button?
— Oh, yes. It's a question of concentration. Concentrate, think, watch, look, and hop, like this, you are ready. But you never know the apex of an event before it happens. So you're shooting, you saty to yourself: "Yes, yes, maybe, yes." But you shouldn't overshoot... Because by the time you press the shutter, and you are ready to shoot once more, maybe you have lost the picture that was in-between.
What he says about concentration can be directly linked to his affinity with Buddhism and his reading of Zen in the Art of Archery. And nowhere did he ever states, as is sometimes heard, that he only took one shot and that was it. From a 1957 interview:
— A contact sheet is so interesting, because you see how a photographer thinks. He comes closer and closer to a subject, corrects it, looks at it again, and then with tiny movements turns around until it is in exactly the right and exact relation to him.
If you look at any contact sheet by Cartier-Bresson, this is exactly what you see.
This excerpt from a 1986 interview is also interesting:
—
The concept of the "decisive moment" has become essential for the aesthetics of a whole generation of photographers. Others, such as Robert Frank, have defined themselves againts what this notion implies about the organization of visualy space and of the world, and have characterized you work with the limited term of "classic space".
— ... It was Dick Simon who found the title for the book, The Decisive Moment, after I had simply used an excerpted quote by Cardinal de Retz as an epigraph in the book... In the end, all moments are equal. But all moments are indecisive within the stream of reality. However, for me, as for any artist, there is recognition of a life-saving formal order, countering disintegration through banality, chaos, and oblivion. And that can be found in Robert Frank's work too, though our visual solutions diverge, in accordance with our visions of the world.
P.S. Maybe just me, but "all moments are indecisive within the stream of reality" would have fitted just fine in any of George Harrison's song of the late 60s, early 70s...
