The Decisive Moment: My Conclusions (for now)

The Decisive Moment
The course notes say
“Before you go any further, give some careful thought to the ‘decisive moment’ debate and note down where you stand (at the moment, anyway) in your learning log.”

I started this process with an earlier post (Project 3: What Matters is to Look)  (before reading more of the suggested texts). Since then I have read more around the subject and this is the subject of subsequent posts (Project 3 ‘What matters is to look’: L’amour tout court and Project 3: The Decisive Moment Part 2 ).

In my first post I concluded:

Thus I would suggest that there is compositional decisiveness and a narrative decisiveness. The former is illustrated by the position of the train in the image of Meudon, all the elements are arranged. But there is also a moment which is important in telling a story or hinting at it, like the position of the man with the package in the same image.

My construct of “compositional decisiveness” relates to the principles I have elaborated upon with regard to the opinions of Suler (Suler, s.d.)  in a later post .

I suggested that the 10 characteristics of an image of a Decisive Moment proposed by Suler, fell into three groups:

A: The compositional elements of the image produce “balance, harmony, simplicity, and unity” (1) with “meaningful figure/ground relationship” (2) and may incorporate “a visual gap, interval, or suspension of some kind” (3). Overall the effect of this composition is to create “an element of ambiguity, uncertainty, and even contradiction”.

B. The image is captured at a “unique, fleeting, and meaningful moment” (5) in “a precisely timed, unrepeatable, one-chance shot” (6) using “an unobtrusive, candid, photorealistic image of people in real life situations” (7)

C: The final image “arouses meaning and emotion about the human condition” (8)

The first of these groups is clearly about composition while the latter ones, particularly the last, will contribute to the narrative.

Bate (Bate, 2016) links the principle of HCB’s “Decisive moment” to “an older concept from art history of telling a story in a single picture”. He describes the suggestion by Lessing, an eighteenth century dramatist and critic, that the ideal way to depict a complex event is by an image “where the past present and future of the story can be read, summed up at a ‘glance’”. He refers to the moment of this image as peripeteia, from the Greek meaning “dramatic moment”.

There is overlap between this narrative aspect and composition, as Bate acknowledges with regard to HCB’s frequent depiction of a figure whose foot is about to strike the ground. “The striding foot indicates a future event, caused by the past, whose outcome is anticipated by what we see in the picture.”

Bate cites HCB, (Images à la Sauvette, 1952) describing his concept of the Decisive Moment as “one unique picture whose composition possesses such vigour and richness and whose content so radiates outward from it that this single picture is a whole story in itself”.

My current position is that the “Decisive Moment” relies on a compositional style and reflects a particular moment describing the human condition. My aim in the next assignment is (unambitiously) to produce a series of images “whose composition possesses such vigour and richness and whose content so radiates outward from it that (each) single picture is a whole story in itself”

I will test the effectiveness of my submission against the ten criteria of Suler and the principle of Bate, that “the past present and future of the story can be read, summed up at a ‘glance’”.

References

References to the works cited in this post are found in my separate post “References”