ABSTRACT
With the idea of moment so central to photography, it’s little surprise that it has been the focus of so much opinion and theorizing. Every commentator and writer who wants to be taken seriously in the field has something to say about it. Henri Cartier-Bresson cornered the market in the idea of there being an independently special moment to be captured with his phrase “the decisive moment”— actually borrowed from the thcentury Cardinal de Retz, very much a nonphotographer, who wrote, “ere is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.” Applied to photography, as Cartier-Bresson did in his book Images à la Sauvette, it seems entirely appropriate, a view bathed in commonsense. “e decisive moment” is hard to avoid and argue against, to the point where it is in danger of being considered a cliché (the fate of all good expressions).
