“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 which give that event its proper expression.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

This photograph below is ‘Man Jumping the Puddle’ also known as ‘Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare’. It is one of the most influential and discussed photos of the world. Like the photograph, the photographer behind this is also significant in the history of photography. If we want to comprehend the deep understanding behind this 1932 photograph, we have to take a tour into the life of Henri Cartier-Bresson first.

Henry Cartier-Bresson was a renowned French Humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography. He pioneered the genre of Street Photography. He viewed photography as capturing a ‘Decisive Moment’.

Cartier-Bresson has started as a painter in the beginning. In 1927 Cartier-Bresson entered a private art school and the Lhote Academy, the Parisian studio of Cubist painter and sculptor Andre Lhote. He joined University of Cambridge in 1929 to study literature and painting.

The most well-known photographic concept attached to Cartier-Bresson is, of course, the idea of the decisive moment. With this one image from 1932 he taught us that if one captures a subject at precisely the right instant, one can shatter normal life to retrieve a transcending moment. The timing, the composition, the totality of the picture, an ordinary moment transcribed as a complete statement. It is at once obvious and marvelous, an act of description and a small revelation.

According to him, the Decisive Moment occurs when the visual and psychological elements of people in a real-life scene spontaneously and briefly come together in perfect resonance to express the essence of that situation. Some people believe that the unique purpose of photography, as compared to other visual arts, is to capture this fleeting, quintessential, and holistic instant in the flow of life.

Regardless of knowing how much time the photographer waited for the scene to be staged, we know about the scarcity of this to be captured in a photograph. Cartier-Bresson has done this job for thousand times maybe. He has implemented his impressions very flawlessly. His photographs are truly very explicit portrayals of Decisive Moment.

“Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.”

-Henri Cartier-Bresson