Magnum History

[Terry Hull]

I picked up a History Of Magnum at the ICP bookstore in NY last week and enjoyed reading it. What a history! The controversy of some photos of historical significance was discussed. For example, the discussion of the Capa photo of the Spanish soldier as he was shot (How does one get a photo with a camera position in front of the soldier, etc.) It reminded me of my thought that some of the famous photos, for example HCB "exact moment" photos, while marvelous photos that I love, I have difficulty understanding how the exact moment could be anticipated-shutter lag, etc.


The book is a good read for folks that like history and photography.

[Brian Ellis]

Cartier Bresson never actually caught the exact moment and only that moment. He did what most 35mm photographers did, made a bunch of photographs and picked the best from the contact sheet. It's one of the reasons I've always had a lot of trouble with the whole "decisive moment" idea. My History of Photography professor used to say the more appropriate term would have been the "decisive edit." HCB put out a lot of BS about his work, there was a big difference between what he said and what he did. Which isn't meant to distract from the quality of the photographs, just the quality of the person.

[tim atherton]

As I recall, Decisive Moment was basically an invention of the english editior/publisher of HCB's book. It then took on a life of it's own

The original title of the book (and by extension the concept it embodied) was Images a la Sauvette. In the context of HCB's book, it's not xactly an easy phrase to translate meaningfully. Combined with my schoolboy french, I have seen this literally translated as something like "images on the run" or "images on the fly (or even sly)" - but that is almost too literal. A more impressionists, but probably still accurate description might be "fleeting moments" or even "very quick with the eye" (although I think there is also something very slightly negative or sneaky about the phrase which "sly" almost captures)

But either way, rather different in meaning from Decisive Moment

perhaps our friend from Besançon can chime in...?

[Emmanuel BIGLER]

Well Tim, I heard about instant décisif (decisive moment) but I did not know for images à la sauvette. The cover page of this book published in 1952 was by famous painter Henri Matisse.
http://www.bibliophoto.com/pages/reservation.php?id=608

à la sauvette would sound to me like quickly grabbed images, but, unfortunately, it sounds like things that are made without being very professional. In the Paris metro, vendeurs à la sauvette mean those guys who try to sell you quickly any kind of stuff more or less legally. Meeting somebody à la sauvette means that by chance you meet somebody in the street while he is in a hurry to catch a train, definitely not the best circumstances to elaborate something important in the few seconds of the discussion.

What I can say is that for many generations of students in photography in France, the kind of imperialistic position of instant décisif and photojournalism has hidden any kind of photographic work based on large format and "slow approach". This situation, and HCB is not totally responsible for this, maintained among young photographers the wrong idea that no reflection was ever needed to create a good picture, only firing the shutter of a pre-focused camera was enough. Any young student who would have deliberately chosen to work with a view camera instead of a 35mm would have been mocked at. France is the country of fashion. Being out of fashion is something extremely difficult to live with when you are young in France. So when the instant décisif was fashionable in France, no place was left for the view camera.

So in a sense it is only now that the digital revolution frightens everybody that young French photographers could seriously consider to perform valuable artistic work with a large format camera... may be it is too late since silver halide photography is supposed to vanish soon ;)

[adrian tyler]

Cartier Bresson never actually caught the exact moment and only that moment. He did what most 35mm photographers did, made a bunch of photographs and picked the best from the contact sheet. It's one of the reasons I've always had a lot of trouble with the whole "decisive moment" idea. My History of Photography professor used to say the more appropriate term would have been the "decisive edit." HCB put out a lot of BS about his work, there was a big difference between what he said and what he did. Which isn't meant to distract from the quality of the photographs, just the quality of the person.

from what i understand hcb didn't edit his own work, people at magnum did it for him, you can see this confirmed by the man himself here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4074157481455007235&q=henri+cartier+bresson