Got a Moment?

There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.
- Cardinal de Retz (1613 - 1679)


In the wake of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s death at the age of 95 in August 2004, writers for the Los Angeles Times referred to him, in terse but sublimely honest words, as "the Frenchman who raised photojournalism to an art form with the use of a small hand-held camera and a vision that photography should capture what he called ‘the decisive moment.’"

Cartier-Bresson, whose first love was painting, once said, "I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant." He told the Washington Post in 1957, "Photography is not like painting. There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever."

In his 1952 book The Decisive Moment (also translated as Images on the Run), Cartier-Bresson noted, "Of all forms of expression, photography is the only one which seizes the instant in flight. We look for the evanescent, the irreplaceable; that is our constant concern." From photographing French Resistance partisans in World War II to the immediate aftermath of Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 to portraits of numerous celebrities, he became the photographer who was at the right place at the right time, all the time. "In photography," he said, "you’ve got to be quick, quick, quick, quick. Like an animal and a prey."

By the early 1970s, Cartier-Bresson had tired of photography, returning to his earlier passions for painting and drawing. He rarely took pictures after 1973 and was equally reluctant to be photographed himself.

According to Cartier-Bresson’s obituary in The New York Times, "His wit, lyricism and ability to see the geometry of a fleeting image and capture it in the blink of an eye reshaped and created a new standard for the art of photography." Robert Sobiezek, curator of photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, commented, "He did for photography what Picasso did for painting. He invented a form that we now call street photography. He changed the way we see photographs."

Hungarian-born Robert Capa, a renowned combat photojournalist whose camera captured five wars - the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II, 1948’s Arab-Israeli War and the First Indochina War (also known as the Franco-Vietnamese War, 1946-1954) - was a mentor and peer of Cartier-Bresson’s. The two were cofounders in 1947 of Magnum Photos, a worldwide cooperative agency for freelance photographers.

Capa’s most famous photograph, "The Falling Soldier," was long thought to depict the September 5, 1936, death of anarchist Federico Borrell Garcia, a Republican soldier of the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth, at the battle site of Cerro Muriano during the Spanish Civil War. The picture was long believed to be a historically documented image until the 1970s, when it was tagged as a staged "moment," taken at a site 30 miles from the battle. According to some accounts, Garcia was shot while hiding behind a tree.

We can’t talk about street photography without paying due attention to Arthur Fellig (above), a press photographer for New York Daily News who cultivated New York’s Lower East Side as his beat in the 1930s and 1940, documenting the Manhattan borough’s emergency services in unflinching depictions of crime, injury, and life and death. He was born Usher Felling in the Ukraine, changed his name to Arthur when the family emigrated to Iraq in 1909, and later earned the nickname "Weegee," a phonetic pronunciation of the so-called prescient Ouija board, because of his uncanny immediate arrival at crime and crisis scenes.


A self-taught photographer, Fellig, armed with a Speed Graphic camera with flashbulbs and a preset focus of ten feet and a homemade darkroom in the trunk of his car, was the sole New York City photojournalist with a permit for a police-band shortwave radio, enabling him to beat the cops to the scene for that "hot-off-the-press" impact. The title of his first book of photographs, The Naked City, was purchased by a Hollywood producer for a gritty 1948 crime melodrama and was subsequently used for the late 1950s police drama series. Joe Pesci’s starring role of "Bernzy" Bernstein in the 1992 film noir "The Public Eye" was obviously inspired by Weegee’s career.

The well-known snapshot of the Loch Ness Monster, purportedly of a plesiosaur residing in a Scottish lake, was first published in the Britain Daily News on April 21, 1934. Taken by Dr. Robert Kenneth Wilson, a gynecologist who refused to publicize it, the picture became known simply as "The Surgeon’s Photograph" and famously launched Scotland’s tourist trade, as well as a number of low-budget horror films.


For years, the subject of the photograph was debated as either an authentic living relic from the Jurassic Period or the head of an otter or a tree trunk. Finally, in 1994, a sculptor named Christian Spurling, on his deathbed at the age of 90, confessed that the photo was actually of a 14-inch toy submarine accessorized with a 12-inch sea serpent’s neck and head made of plastic and wood, painted gray. Besides Spurling and Dr. Wilson, the hoax involved a flamboyant, self-styled big game hunter, Marmaduke "Duke" Wetherell, who happened to be Spurling’s father-in-law.

"Raising the Flag at Iwo Jima" is the only photograph to win the Pulitzer Prize the same year it was published. It’s a well-documented fact that the iconic picture from World War II recorded the second flag-raising atop Mount Suribachi on the Japanese island after its capture on February 23, 1945. Staff Sergeant Louis R. Lowery, a photographer for the Marines’ Leatherneck magazine, covered the first event (below), whose participants included Richfield, Minnesota, electrician Charles W. Lindberg (standing, right).

The first flag was deemed too small to be visible from the nearby landing beaches, so a second, larger flag was called for. Joe Rosenthal, a war correspondent for the Associated Press, was hauling his bulky Speed Graphic camera up the slope of Suribachi when he saw the second group of Marines preparing to raise the large flag while the first group was lowering the smaller one. He considered taking a picture including both flags but decided to focus on the larger star-spangled banner.

"I took the picture" Rosenthal recalled, "the Marines took Iwo Jima." Of the six men in the photograph, three were subsequently killed in the ongoing battle while the three surviving soldiers became celebrities with varying degrees of fame and infamy.

Among those was 22-year-old Navy Corpsman Ira Hayes (above), a Pima Native American who portrayed himself in a bit part in the 1949 John Wayne movie "Sands of Iwo Jima." After his discharge, Hayes, uncomfortable with his fame and victimized by racial prejudice, spiraled downward into alcoholism and died from exposure and alcohol poisoning at the age of 32. He was portrayed by Tony Curtis in the 1961 film "The Outsider" and by Adam Beach ("Windtalkers") in 2006’s "Flags of Our Fathers."

Upon his death in 2004 at age 97, Carl Mydans was noted in The New York Times obituary headline as a photographer "who told his stories with a single picture." During his career-long association with Life magazine, he covered the Sino-Japanese War, the Soviet invasion of Finland, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam war. Asked why he spent so much time of his career photographing conflict, he responded, "War is not my delight. War was the event of my years."

"Known for his journalistic instincts rather than for any stylistic trait," The New York Times noted, "Mr. Mydans recognized that his success required more than good reflexes with a camera." Mydans said in 1985, "When you are a war photographer…there are three important things. The first is to get where the action is and to photograph it. The second is to get that film back from where you’ve been shooting…A third is to keep a careful record of what you have photographed."

Mydans’ most celebrated photograph - of World War II General Douglas MacArthur’s return to Luzon Island in the Philippines, striding grimly through the surf in his trademark aviator glasses - was taken on January 9, 1945. In March of 1942, MacArthur was forced to retreat from the Philippines but famously vowed, "I shall return." Two and a half years later, American forces overwhelmed Japanese ships in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, ultimately leading to the landing on Luzon.

Pontoons had been prepared to accommodate MacArthur’s dry-footed approach, but the landing craft purposely reversed course and avoided the pontoons. Mydans, who in a flash realized exactly what MacArthur was up to, ran along the shoreline until, "as I expected, the boat turned and headed in, and there I was standing in my dry shoes waiting for MacArthur to come ashore wading in the knee-deep water." Mydans would later remark of the general, "No one I have ever known in public life had a better understanding of the drama and power of a picture."

Mydans would be perpetually frustrated over stories that MacArthur had actually swaggered ashore twice to give Mydans - the only still photographer assigned to the landing - a better snapshot. "He did it once," Mydans insisted. "I now realize the question will go on forever."


"Long after I am gone," Mydans once said, "I want people to be able to see - especially to feel - what I have seen and feel."

Alfred Eisenstaedt was a German emigrant who worked as a photographer for Life from 1936 to 1972, renowned for shooting at least 90 covers for the magazine. His image of a U.S. sailor kissing a young nurse in Times Square on V-J Day (Victory over Japan Day) on August 14, 1945, virtually became an overnight cultural icon.

Eisenstaedt later said, "I saw a sailor running along the street grabbing any girl in sight…I was running ahead of him with my Leica…Then suddenly, in a flash, I saw something white being grabbed. I turned around and clicked the moment the sailor kissed the nurse…People tell me that when I am in heaven they will remember this picture."

French photographer Robert Doisneau started roaming the streets of Paris in the 1930s with his ubiquitous Leica camera (fellow photographic pioneer Henri Cartier-Bresson considered his Leica a physical extension of his eye). His image of a couple kissing by the Hotel de Ville, known as "Kiss at City Hall," was printed in the June 12, 1950, issue of Life magazine and became an iconic symbol of young love in Paris.

The couples’ identity remained a mystery until 1992, when it was revealed that the subjects in the staged photo were aspiring actors. The woman remembered, "The photo was posed. But the kiss was real."

On February 1, 1968, South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan summarily executed a Viet Cong officer, Nguyen Van Lem, in the streets of Saigon during the Tet Offensive. The startling image of the killing of an apparently defenseless prisoner, dubbed "Saigon Execution" and regarded at the most famous photo of the Vietnam War, garnered Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams the Pulitzer Prize while galvanizing antiwar protests in the U.S.

In a New York Times piece titled "The Pulitzer Eddie Adams Didn’t Want," Adams was quoted as calling the image a "reflex picture." Adams, who served in the Marines as a combat photographer during the Korean War, adamantly insisted that "Saigon Execution" was not his most important picture and didn’t want a future obituary to start with the words, "the photographer best known for his iconic Vietnam photograph ‘Saigon Execution.’"

Adams deeply desired the Pulitzer for his photograph of Jacqueline Kennedy holding the folded flag at President John F. Kennedy’s funeral in November 1963. (The Pulitzer instead went to Dallas Times-Herald photographer Robert H. Jackson for his picture of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald.)

The photographer felt guilty about the South Vietnamese general’s bum rap for the execution and that as the photographer, he himself played a significant role in "ruining a man’s life." In Time magazine, Adams noted, "The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world."

Nguyen Ngoc Loan fled Vietnam during the fall of Saigon and tried to open a restaurant in northern Virginia, but protesters closed it down. Adams apologized in person to Loan for ruining his life, but the South Vietnamese native said, "Let it go." After Loan died, Adams sent flowers to the family, along with a card reading, "I’m sorry. There are tears in my eyes."

In 1977, Adams won the Robert Capa Gold Medal from the Overseas Press Club for a series of pictures about Vietnamese boat people seeking refuge in Thailand in a photo essay called "The Boat of No Smiles." Interviewed on PBS, Adams said, "It did some good and nobody got hurt."


Another Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph from the Vietnam War depicted nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc fleeing down a road in near the village of Trang Bang in southeastern Vietnam after being severely burned on her back by a South Vietnamese napalm attack. The picture, taken on June 8, 1972, by Nick Ut, an Associated Press photographer from southern Vietnam, was published despite the Associated Press’ objections to nudity. The girl had torn off her burning clothes, and before Ut delivered his film for developing, he took her to the hospital.

Reacting to President Richard Nixon’s doubts over the picture’s authenticity, Ut has noted, "The horror of the Vietnam war recorded by me did not have to be fixed. That terrified little girl is still alive today and has become an eloquent testimony to the authenticity of that photo…That moment…has ultimately changed both our lives."

As an adult, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, who had been exploited as a propaganda symbol by Vietnam’s communist government, eventually sought and was granted political asylum, with her husband, in Canada. In 1977, she established an international foundation aimed at providing medical and psychological assistance to child victims of war. (Below, Phuc is reunited with photographer Nick Ut.)

"To take photographs is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeting reality," Henri Cartier-Bresson once said. "It is at that moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy."

Today’s technology has sadly all but destroyed the spontaneity and artistry in what Cartier-Bresson once exalted as "the decisive moment." When even home-use digital cameras are capable of shooting eight frames per second - the equivalent of going through two rolls of 24-exposure film in about five seconds - where is that "great physical and intellectual joy" of capturing the instant of fleeting reality?

Don’t hold your breath.