Informant38

The Times/The Australian: Master of the decisive moment [August 06, 2004]:
From 1936 to 1939 Cartier-Bresson was an assistant to Jean Renoir, working on the films Partie de Campagne and La Regle du Jeu. During the German invasion of France in 1940 he was made a prisoner of war, but he escaped in 1943 and began work with the Resistance, assisting others to escape. He photographed the liberation of Paris in 1944 and made Le Retour, a documentary film about the return of prisoners of war.
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The slogan The Decisive Moment suggested that there was only one right frame. Either one photograph is the decisive moment or all photographs are decisive moments. The phrase implies that Cartier-Bresson only took one shot of any situation or, if he took more, only one frame was the decisive one. While this was true of the prints he released, we know a little of his way of working from different frames from the same sequence reproduced 25 years apart in two of his books. The subject is Muslim Women Praying at Dawn and the two frames, so similar yet compositionally quite different, call into question the whole idea of a single critical moment.