Cartier-Bresson and puddle jumping

By Bruce Cairns

There is a fascinating article at this link - as you will see, thanks to Google Street View, we can see the Gare St. Lazare from the side from which Cartier-Bresson made one of his most iconic images in 1932.

It is an extraordinary photograph. Apart from the shadow of the jumping man (I have heard it said many times that the most crucial part of the whole image, by which it stands or falls, is the gap between the right foot and its shadow, and I agree), there are so many other details. The hands on the church clock echo the shape of the man. The hoops on the ground are echoed by the curve of the water at both ends of the ladder. The poster shows a dancer in a similar "flying" stance to the man with an echoing shadow, but this time echoed horizontally, but then also reflected vertically in the puddle - you can go on and on finding new details.

Cartier-Bresson is the photographer credited with defining the idea of the "decisive moment". He said "the decisive moment, it is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression." Surely this image epitomises that statement - but how did he achieve such compositional perfection in the photograph without setting it up? Predictably, many people have accused him of exactly that, and there are stories of him not only setting it up, but having the man jump over and over again until he got it right. I've tried (not too strenuously, it has to be said) to track down the sources of these rumours, without success. Personally I don't believe it.

I like Cartier-Bresson's dry statement that he "happened to be peeking through a gap in the fence with my camera at the moment the man jumped." I have little doubt that this is the truth, and that it was Cartier-Bresson's extraordinary timing and skill with his Leica rangefinder camera that enabled him to open the shutter at the decisive moment. There is another important detail that supports this. He always presented his images full frame, including the black border of the 35mm film rebate to show that it was the entire frame without cropping (arguably a curious conceit, but that is another topic). In this case, he had to crop. As he said, "The space between the planks was not entirely wide enough for my lens, which is the reason why the picture is cut off on the left." You can find the uncropped version on the web - such as here, where there is a good article about the photo - and it is clear that it was cropped. That wouldn't have happened if HC-B had set it up like a film set!

I can't leave this topic without linking to a wonderful hommage to this image (with thanks to David Ward for the introduction to the Lego version) - here. There was also another hommage, shot by David Ward himself, which involved a flying Eddie Ephraums on a Scottish beach, but that unfortunately seems to have vanished from the web.

Norfolk Open Studios - coming up

Norfolk Open Studios 2012 is taking place between 26 May and 10 June.

Our studio will be open, and more details will follow later. In the meantime, if you're participating in NOS, don't forget to get in touch with us sooner rather than later for your artwork photography, giclée prints and cards. We'd be very pleased to speak to you, and, if you wish, for you to visit us at the studio for a chat.