We have grown accustomed to digital cameras and we constantly take pictures with our smartphones. We probably take too many pictures: quite often they are not even technically good, but we take them just to satisfy a personal need or show our friends where we are, what we are eating or what we are wearing. Besides, rather than printing them, we tend to store our pictures in our devices and forget them, only to discover them years later, like long-forgotten visual treasures.
Things were different in the past, definitely slower, but painstaking image-making can still teach us something. Henri Cartier-Bresson first picked up a Leica 35mm film camera in 1931 and revolutionized things with the "decisive moment" approach to photography that consisted in capturing a split second that reveals a larger truth, a concept that he made famous in his eponymous 1952 book.
According to Cartier-Bresson, the "decisive moment" represented not only "the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event," but also the "precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression."
His signature shooting technique was to find a visually intriguing setting for a photograph and then patiently wait for that decisive moment to happen. In 1947 (and then later, in 1960), Cartier-Bresson focused on the United States' vast landscape and diverse population, and took a variety of images in different cities, of artists and writers for Harper's Bazaar. In New York, he took pictures in neighborhoods from the Lower East Side, to Harlem, and Brooklyn.
Some of the images of Easter Sunday in Harlem are beautiful moments: women are dressed up in their Sunday best and they are wearing hats; happiness and expectations are in the air. One famous picture from this series portrays a Black couple, an elegant young woman in a floral hat in the foreground, while a man stands behind her smiling. The image is carefully constructed, it is a rigorous composition with a great pictorial value that perfectly captures the beauty and joy of Easter and Spring. Happy Easter!
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