THE DECISIVE MOMENT
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson: THE DECISIVE MOMENT. New York and Paris: Simon and Schuster in Collaboration with Editions Verve, 1952. First English-language edition [published simultaneously in French as Images A La Sauvette (a more literal translation of the title--and possibly more evocative--would be 'Images on the Run'). Folio. Decorated paper cover boards. 158 pp. 126 black and white gravure reproductions. Captions booklet laid in. Cover illustration by Henri Matisse. Boards lightly rubbed with four parallel dust spots to rear panel [see scan], spine uniformly darkened, both heel and crown lightly bumped and starting to splitting at junctures. Gift inscription to front free endpaper. Textblock slightly shaken, but pages bright and unmolested. A nearly very good copy of this legendary and fragile folio.
10.75 x 14.5 hardcover book with 158 pages and 126 black and white gravure reproductions. Original cover illustration by Henri Matisse. As Martin Parr and Gerry Badger write in The Photobook: A History, Vol. 1 this renowned volume is more than a monograph; "it has overriding unifying factors that elevate it into a great photobook. The first is the concept of the 'decisive moment' itself, which defines the elegance of Cartier-Bresson's imagery: the instant when all the elements in the picture-frame come together to make the perfect image--not the peak of action necessarily, but the formal peak . . . . [It] is one of the greatest of all photobooks."
Widely considered the greatest photographer of the twentieth century, Henri Cartier-Bresson [1908 - 2004] disdained careful preliminary setups. Instead, he approached his work like a hunter, camera always at the ready to record a fleeting expression, an angle, a deed. His intuition and lightning grasp of the perfect composition could make a story out of a stranger's casual gesture or a fleeting confluence of shadow and reflection.
The decisive moment is when the world stands still and something unique is born. This artistic philosophy was captured in his landmark 1952 book and essay "The Decisive Moment," probably the most poetically instructive evocation of the field photographer's art yet written.