Assignment 3 – The Decisive Moment Reworked

Sussex as the sun goes down.

I made the following alterations to this assignment following tutor feed back – I explored and rearranged the order in which I have presented the images. Discussion here had focused on how each of the photographs leads through the going down of the light and the subsequent end of the day. With this in mind, I moved the first picture, ‘Going down in a blaze of glory’ to the end. The discussion had also focused on the captioning of the images – it was noted that I had switched between lyrical, descriptive captions and practical ones. The suggestion was that I should try to do the series both ways and choose which one best suited the intent of my series. Talking about why I chose to take this series of photographs, I realised that they were symbolic of the situation created by the Covid-19 crisis. It feels very much like the sun is going down on the life that we know and have become accustomed to, crowded places are now empty and we are not yet certain of what the next day will bring. With this in mind I decided to keep the lyrical captions, amending some along the way, as a way of leading the viewer’s understanding of the photographs.

Before taking Decisive/Indecisive photographs it was important to understand what this meant and research for project 3 gave insights into this. Zouhair Ghazzal (Ghazzal, 2004) say’s ‘‘The decisive moment is, therefore, that infinitely small and unique moment in time which cannot be repeated, and that only the photographic lens can capture’, he goes on to say they are invariably anecdotal and rely on gesture. This is not quite the take that Sean O’Hagan (O’Hagan, 2014) has on the matter in his Guardian article ‘the decisive moment has come to mean the perfect second to press the shutter’ or when he quotes Henri Cartier-Bresson in that same article as saying “Photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organisation of forms which give that event its proper expression.”

My take on it is therefore, something that cannot be repeated and which will change in the next instant to something that is not as good as that first instant and that evokes a sense of time and place.

I don’t feel that I am a street photographer, and this posed a challenge for this assignment as so many examples of the Decisive/Indecisive moment come from photographers such as Cartier-Bresson and Paul Graham, who are.   

I had a number of single examples that could be considered more classical decisive moments but for me (Buchanan, 2020), the difficulty was finding images that could be part of a series.

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An essay by Spencer Cox where he insists that ‘even landscapes, which tend to be relatively static, move and change dramatically as the day goes by. This means that you can apply the concept of the decisive moment just as easily’ (Cox, 2020 ) convinced me to go down that route.

This assignment may at the same time prove decisive and indecisive, each image taken in isolation is decisive, light and weather can change so quickly that the perfect moment is ephemeral.  But, as Zouhair Ghazzal intimated by when looking at the work of Walker Evans and Lee Friedlander, by creating a series of photographs the whole has a timeless, indecisive quality.

The Photographs

The link for all my photographs is place and time; Sussex at Sunset. This was actually a very tricky thing to perfect for two reasons, the weather which comes in from the coast across the land west to east, changes quickly and can obscure any sun in a matter of seconds. Secondly at this time of year the light goes very quickly.

Why these pictures?

The photograph that started this series was 5. A beacon to light. The idea was to find something that could only be seen at a particular time. I did a number of shots, which can be seen on the contact sheet. What made this one special was the way the line of the setting sun made the bottom of the beacon glow with the same coppery light.

1. Bodiam as the sun goes down 2020 – other attempts at this shot can be seen on the contact sheet. I chose it for the colours created by the setting sun and the way a path of light leads to the Castle. The image below shows two options side-by-side; I chose the first image over the second as, although the light was similar, the second image was to close up on the castle and didn’t have the narrative of the light pointing the way from the foreground to the background.

2. Late sunlight on railings 2020 – These railings look very dull at other times of the day. Their repetitive nature intrigued me and once again the low height and colour of the sun make them appear special.

3. Standing out from the sky 2020 – I took a lot of shots with various settings as it was difficult to get the right balance where the sky didn’t look washed out. It was the sky that made the photograph interesting for me and the contrast of the man-made against the natural.

4. A beacon to light 2020 -The clouds were rolling in very fast and blocking the sun’s rays and I had almost called it a day when I notice that the base of the beacon was glowing like bronze, picking up the strip of light the same colour as it shone between a gap in the clouds.

5. Winchelsea Beach 2020 – During the height of summer and the long days, beaches tend to be the reserve of day-trippers and holiday makers. They therefore take on a different feel and different life in winter or late afternoon; its at these times that locals come down and meander across the pebbles.

6. Last light across the waves 2020 – This photograph is probably under exposed but I like the dramatic quality it brings to the image.

7. Driving into the sunset 2020 – As with the photograph of Rye, this image was totally unplanned and unexpected. Whilst taking pictures of the outgoing sea and the people on the beach a rumbling noise made me turn around and there at the top of the shingle were these enormous dumper trucks. It was very unexpected and out of place and it was a matter of luck that I happened to be there at the right time.

8. Rye against a setting sun 2020 – This was such a decisive moment that I only had my iPhone to hand and hence has no shooting details.

Contact Sheets

https://katie9.home.blog/assignments/assignment-3-the-decisive-moment/contact-sheets-for-assignment-3/

References

Buchanan, Katie (2020) The Decisive Moment [Online] Available at: https://katie9.home.blog/2020/12/17/the-decisive-moment/ Accessed 17.12.2020

Cox, Spencer (2020) The Decisive moment in Landscape Photography [Online] Photography Life. Available at: https://photographylife.com/landscapes/the-decisive-moment-in-landscape-photography Accessed 01.12.2020

Fraenkel Gallery (2020) Artists – Lee Friedlander [Online] Available at: https://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/lee-friedlander Accessed 01.12.2020

Ghazzal, Z.(2004)the indecisiveness of the decisive moment. [Online] Available at: http://zouhairghazzal.com/photos/aleppo/cartier-bresson.htm Accessed: 01.11.2020

O’Hagan, S. (2014) Cartier-Bresson’s classic is back – but his Decisive Moment has passed [Online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/dec/23/henri-cartier-bresson-the-decisive-moment-reissued-photography Accessed: 01.11.2020

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