What constitutes a Decisive Moment?

All Photographers, or at least, those who find their way into even the most elementary photography ‘theory’, come across the concept of ‘the decisive moment’ fairly quickly. In his 1952 book of the same name, the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (the ultimate champion of the decisive moment) wrote,

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.

This is a photograph of the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, looking at the photographer (and at us) amidst a tense moment of negotiation with her cabinet. The caption of the photograph claims that this tense moment is just before the political party she heads, the Indian National Congress, splits. But given that this image was made in 1967, and the split in the INC did not take place until a full two years later, in 1969, then either this is a prophetic image, or the caption is wrong.

If then, this image was not made in the midst of an agitated negotiation between a Prime Minister and her party, if it was made on another (now not as decisive of a moment), then does it still hold its gravitas?

I have always wondered if a photograph is made decisive by what happens within the image plane itself – the moment before a gun is fired, a jump caught in mid-air, or if it is made decisive by the context in which it is made.

Perhaps we give too much credit to photographic acrobatics, and not enough to the words that accompany them out into the world. And if in its journey into the archive, those words get lost, or altered, then what of the power of the image itself?