EYV Online Meetup 28 June 2019: The Decisive Moment
Led by Robert Bloomfield
The topic for this meeting was “The Decisive Moment”, the title of the third assignment on EYV, and my next assignment.
In a previous post I have described my initial thoughts about this topic. For the meeting we were encouraged to bring images to discuss in terms of the “Decisive Moment”. I described my thoughts about compositional decisiveness and narrative decisiveness. Robert suggested that the latter is an extension of Cartier-Bresson’s original concept, but one that has been considered by others. He referred me to the writings of David Bates on this.
I showed this image which I have previously suggested in this blog as a “decisive moment”.
Robert discussed and introduced the concepts of “architectural framing” and “gesture” as characterising the Cartier-Bresson “classical” (my quotes) decisiveness. He pointed out the framing of the figure by the posts and suggested this is a type of architectural framing. He also commented on the posture of the figure, as representing “gesture”. This was a helpful discussion and helped me to understand the way forward with the assignment.
We discussed the use of film for the assignment. I am considering using this medium in order to avoid the temptation to use high speed continuous shooting to obtain the precise moment of decisiveness!
The other learning points I took away are suggestions for further reading including “Camera Lucida” by Roland Barthes.
Andrew Procter 