The Decisive Moment
Henri Cartier-Bresson
The Decisive Moment is one of the greatest photography books ever published. It contains a large sampling of the best photographs from the first twenty years of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s career. Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908 – 2004) was a French photographer. He was one of the founding members of Magnum Photos in 1947. In the 1970s he switched from photography to painting.
The Decisive Moment is Cartier-Bresson’s first real book. The book opens with an introduction by the photographer in which he tells about his own philosophy. Followed by a long sequence of photographs taken in the Occident, and a few pages of captions. Then comes a second set of photographs taken in the Orient, again ending with their descriptions. Af the end of the American version follows a technical text by publisher Simon.
Strictly speaking, The Decisive Moment is a monograph of Cartier-Bresson’s best work. But it has overriding unifying factors that elevate it into a great photobook. The first is the concept of the ‘decisive moment’ itself: the instant when all the elements in the picture-frame come together to make the perfect image. No one achieved it more often or better than Cartier-Bresson himself. Allied with it was Cartier-Bresson’s clear-eyed view of the world: astute, non-sentimental, beautiful, profound. His pictures distinguish themselves by his humanist view of life.
In a camp of displaces persons waiting for repatriation, a Gestapo informer who had pretended to be a refugee is discovered and exposed by a camp inmate whose face is illuminated by the strong, sharp light of reage.
Verve published Images à la Sauvette in 1952. It had an original cover by Henri Matisse. The publication was the result of a collaboration between the photographer, the famous art critic and publisher Tériades, and Matisse. Tériades had planned a book with Henri Cartier-Bresson in the late 1930s. But the war intervened. Eventually Tériades published Images à la sauvette in 1952. For its American version, published in the same year, the title became The Decisive Moment.
A tented refugee camp of 300.000 people living on the old battlefield of the gods - Kurukshetra. The great Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, relates that it was here, many thousands of years ago, that a great battle between good and evil took place. The government and some charitable organizations give the refugees food. But what gives them hope ?
The publication in the United States made Cartier-Bresson an international superstar. The book received tremendous critical acclaim and is now considered a ‘bible for photographers’. It remains a reference for photographers to this day. The American version, published by Simon and Schuster, was the first to introduce the now-famous expression ‘decisive moment’.
During the last days of the Kuomintang supremacy, the currency was failing and the government put gold on the market. People rushed to all the banks in the city and pushed and crowded those who had got there before them. Seven people died in the crushing of crowds.
The original edition has become a collector’s item and is now out of print. The Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson has made this classic photography book accessible again, in a smaller and practical format, at an affordable price.
The Decisive Moment
Photographer: Henri Cartier-Bresson
First published in 1952 by Simon and Schuster in collaboration with Éditions Verve
Fascimile edition by Steidl first published in 2014
New edition in 2025 by Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
Hardback with decorated paper, jacket and laid-in 12-pages caption booklet
37 x 27,4 cm, 158 pages and 126 black&white photographs
Introduction by Henri Cartier-Bresson, afterword by Richard Simon, cover/jacket by Henri Matisse
Considered as one of the greatest photobooks of all time by Source Magazine
Mentioned in The Photobook: A History. Volume 1. Edited by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger.