The Decisive Moment was one of Henri Cartier Bresson’s Photo books, first published in France in 1952, and originally named in French as Images à la sauvette, which roughly translates to “images on the run”. The front cover of the book was created by the artist Henri Matisse and the photo book consisted of 126 plates of Bresson’s photographs from around the world from the East to the West, around Asia, his native France, and to the US. The book also includes famous faces of infamous artists and writers of the time, such as Sartre, Matisse, and Faulkner to name a few. The book, The Decisive Moment really does capture, unveils and sums up Bresson’s revolutionary approach to photography.
The Deceive Moment also contains one of Bresson’s best known and most iconic images, the man leaping over a large puddle and touching it with his heel an early photograph taken Behind the Gare St. Lazare, Paris in 1932. Bresson’s commentary on this photograph he said: There was a plank fence around some repairs behind the Gare Saint-Lazare train station. I happened to be peeking through a gap in the fence with my camera at the moment the man jumped. This, along with others in the book presents the way Bresson sought to capture in his photography.
In the preface of the book Bresson tells us that: "To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms that give that event its proper expression.” And throughout the book we see these fleeting images, moments in time captured in the blink of an eye, or the camera’s shutter!
There's an exclusive opportunity to take a look through the whole of Henri Cartier Bresson's book online, to view The Decisive Moment online, visit efotobooks.com and take a look through the book! Gracious thanks to efotobooks for making Bresson's The Decisive Moment available to us online!
Further Reading
Henri Cartier Bresson
Henri Cartier Bresson, (1908-2004) was a French Photographer who's considered as one of the greatest photographers of the 20th Century. Henri Cartier Bresson pioneered a new moment in the art of photography, the art of Photojournalism
Henri Cartier Bresson's First Inspiration
Photographer Henri Cartier Bresson is one of the worlds greatest photographers of the past Century. Although at first Cartier Bresson had ambitions to be a painter! Find out what exactly it was that gave him inspiration that made him change his mind.
