James Baquet

    There was a time when the process of photography was cumbersome. The equipment was bulky, and exposure times were long, so that subjects had to pose stiffly for several minutes.

    Time passed, and cameras became smaller, lighter, and faster. Just as with today’s “digital revolution,” a new type of photography became possible: the candid shot.

    The French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) took advantage of this important change. He was one of the first to adopt the smaller, lighter 35 millimeter film cameras, and became a master of both the candid photo and what is now called “street photography,” the capturing of strangers in the passing scene without the subjects’ awareness that they are being photographed.

    Cartier-Bresson was from a well-to-do family, and was educated in the arts — and English. He went to England’s Cambridge University, and served in the French army. His first camera was a gift from the ill-fated American expat playboy Harry Crosby, and with the permission of Crosby, Cartier-Bresson had an affair with Crosby’s wife. Two years after Crosby died in an apparent murder-suicide, the affair ended, and Cartier-Bresson went to Africa, where he excelled at hunting. He was later to use the techniques developed as a hunter in “stalking” his photographic subjects.

    After viewing a photograph of three African boys running into a lake (taken by Hungarian photojournalist Martin Munkacsi), Cartier-Bresson realized the potential of photography. “I suddenly understood,” he said, “that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant.”

    This led to the idea for which Cartier-Bresson is most famous: the decisive moment.

    A 17th-century churchman had said, “There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.” Cartier-Bresson wrote in 1952 that “To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.”

    And no other medium could capture that moment like photography.

    Vocabulary

    Which word above means:

    1. making of a photograph (“exposing” the film to light)

    2. awkwardly, not moving freely

    3. sexual relationship with another person’s husband or wife

    4. at the same time

    5. large and difficult to use

    6. informal, not planned

    7. hard to carry

    8. sneaking up on someone or something

    9. be in place for a photo

    10. exact