We 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. We cannot develop and print a memory.
– Henri Cartier-Bresson
We exi...
We 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. We cannot develop and print a memory.
– Henri Cartier-Bresson
We exist on a treadmill of forgetting and anticipating. We labor to preserve what we treasure of our past, even while the present shotguns us with a thousand new options, one of which must become our future. One of which we must choose.
In this maelstrom of time it is hard to be calm; to understand what warrants attention, and what can be ignored. This state of tranquility and presence has been the essence of the modern photographic act, best characterized in the popular mind by Cartier-Bresson’s concept of the “Decisive Moment.”
Cartier-Bresson believed that the photographer is like a hunter, going forth into the wild, armed with quick reflexes and a finely-honed eye, in search of that one moment that most distills the time before him.
In this instant the photographer reacts, snatching truth from the timestream in the snare of his shutter. The Decisive Moment is Gestalt psychology married to reflexive performance art in the blink of a mechanical eye.
It is the creation of art through the curation of time.
In Ancient Rome, officials in charge of overseeing the assets of the Empire were called Curators. This meant, literally, “caretaker.” The fall of the Roman Empire left the Catholic Church to carry on the role of curator, and by the Middle Ages the role had become ecclesiastical, with parish priests caretaking the souls of their flock.
Cardinal de RetzIn fact, Cartier-Bresson’s choice of the term “decisive moment” itself comes from a quote by a 17th century Cardinal de Retz: “There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.”
The Cardinal’s role as a political agitator lends a Machiavellian patina to the phrase when you read the rest of the quote, which continues, “and the masterpiece of good ruling is to know and seize this moment.”
The modern relationship of “curator” to “art” arose in the princely courts of the Renaissance, when aristocrats sought to outshine each other in their support for the arts, and began building wings on their palaces for the showcasing of these collections, along with expensive printed catalogs to extend the reach of the art (and the glory of the owner.)
As we transitioned from aristocratic feudalism to the democratic nation state this form evolved into the modern museum and its attendant curators.
Presently the act of curation, or the title of curator at least, is undergoing an elastic expansion. Companies employ celebrities to curate the lineups of cultural festivals, and stylists to curate capsule collections of fashion they can sell to untapped demographics.
Online, members of the Tumblr generation compliment each other on their “curation.” On Facebook each day we see a continuous scroll of content curated by friends, and companies that pay for the privilege of sneaking in with them.
Curation, curation everywhere. And what of photographers? The curation of moments. Of perspectives. Of angles. This has always been so, although the technical limitations of primitive photographic technology falsely imposed a performance art aspect on the medium, a “dance” if you will.
The notion that a large part of the creativity of the medium was the ability to recognize and capture moments in real-time was the central conceit of the Decisive Moment. But in fact, much of what Cartier-Bresson describes is not about the art, but mainly about the tools that he had access to: the portable rangefinder camera and increasingly fast films, which enabled him to roam and grab action from the air as it unfolded before him, in ways previous eras of artists could not:
Photography is not like painting. There is a creative fraction of a second when you ar
