The decisive moment is the instant when the elements of a scene come together to form the strongest picture. The phrase is linked to Henri Cartier-Bresson. His 1952 book Images à la sauvette was published in English as The Decisive Moment, a title chosen by the American publisher Simon and Schuster.
In the book, Cartier-Bresson described photography as recognizing, in a fraction of a second, both the meaning of an event and the arrangement of forms that expresses it. The idea became central to street photography.
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