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CARTIER BRESSON'S PHOTOGRAPH OF A DECISIVE MOMENT

Writer's picture: Raymond BirdRaymond Bird

Updated: May 25, 2020


I am a great fan of Bresson; in particular the photograph above. In this photograph Bresson captures a 'Decisive Moment'... The man in the photograph has come across a shallow flooded street and makes the decision to walk on through the water. Bresson has set the camera to freeze the moment of the man's decisive moment.



3 decades on. The camera still recording a decisive moment in time. The photograph records the exact moment the Vietnamese soldier executes a communist Viet Cong soldier.


Photo manipulation was accidentally discovered by William Mumler in 1861. Mumler had taken a self portrait with a glass slide. His rush to reuse the slide resulted with traces of a previous photograph of his cousin still on the glass slide. When Mumler developed the slide of his self portrait he could clearly see a ghost like image of his cousin in the background. A double exposure...


1960 This highly controversial photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald was used for propaganda as part of a coverup of certain aspects of the assassination of John F Kennedy. The photograph is obviously fake. I believe it is Oswald in the photograph. The rifle and the newspaper are the only things added to the photograph. Not the head as the conspiracy theorists suggested.


The photograph can no longer be relied on as a truthful decisive moment in time.


Since the 1980's we have seen the arrival of Digital Photography and post production with laser and inkjet printers replacing chemical darkrooms. Photo manipulation is now seamless with Adobe computer software. Photo manipulation is now responsible for what is now known as fine art photography. Fine art photography with the use of Adobe software is able to create many different moments in time that it is not possible with just a straight photographic image directly from the camera.


With this photograph I have been able to create a "Historical Moment in Time". A memory... At 6 years old I remember sitting on the kitchen doorstep watching two planes in the sky; one caught in the searchlights. My father said to me that it was a "Dog Fight"

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