noimmunity said:
It's funny to see this thread now, because I have been thinking a lot recently about starting one that is a critique of the practice of the "decisive moment".
I'm not going to try your patience with a specialist's viewpoint, but I will say that I find the idea of the "decisive moment" to be an anachronistic concept whose founding assumptions do not correspond to the way either social relations or collective passions and sensibilities are organized today. In fact, the only thing that is "decisive" about the aesthetics of the "decisive moment" today is its irrevocable disappearance AND the huge nostalgia that apparently accompanies this disappearance.
I suggest we have to contextualize the aesthetics of the "decisive moment" in relation to society, economy and politics.
Why? As an individual working on individual work, I do not need a social, economic, or political relationship to what I do. You are creating something that does not follow.
As a practice and not just a concept, "the decisive moment" is not just an aesthetics of the image, but a very condensed series of assumptions that FRAMES THE IDENTITY OF AN EVENT.
I would say that is not true. There is no reason that this idea is trying to create any identity. It can simply be showing what is happening at a moment.
The aesthetics of the "decisive moment" cannot be separated from ideas about individuality, property, labor and the image of man that for the most part dovetail with notions of possessive individualism, national sovereignty, and anthropological difference inherited from the Enlightenment that defined the high modernity of industrial capitalism.
Proof for this statement comes from where? I see nothing that connects Carier Bresson's comment with this.
However, fundamental changes in the mode of production since the 1970s--i.e., the transition from industrial capitalism to cognitive capitalism (usually called "knowledge economy" in the anglophone countries)--have led us to a very new type of social organization, based more on disorganized networks and flexible accumulation than strict models of command and control and mass production. It is very difficult for us now to say where is the actual site of "decision" in society today. We have arrived, in fact, at a point where the standard modernist aesthetics (reflected in the concept of a "decisive" moment) just doesn't correspond to our lived reality.
You are misinterpreting Cartier Bression's comment. You are also trying very weakly to link ideas and concepts that are unrelated. As far as photography, every photograph is a moment that the artist has decides to exhibit.
My lived reality is also a collection of decisive moments. So your assumptions are false.
To put it in a nutshell, whereas the fundamental question of cultural production during the era of industrial capitalism (which was also a period of imperialism, colonialism, differential development, war and revolution) was "who am I (or who are we)?", the fundamental question of our current era is going to be "what can we become?"
Here again proof for these assumptions and what connection is there to a photograph?
The aesethic behind much of what is being called "decisive moment" here today is what I would call "spectacular ethnicization" or more generally "spectacular anthropologization" (which includes gender, race, class etc).
Maybe you don't understand the decisive moment and that is why you are having a problem with it. It is not a political declaration.
It highlights the former question (who are we? or again, who are they?) rather than the latter (what can we become?), and as such deny the possibility that a) objects of the ethnic gaze could be become subjects of unprecedented new innovation, and b) that the viewers of these photos, regardless of their anthropological coding, must share responsibility to become something new and different. To a certain extent "spectacular ethnicization" is practically unavoidable in our era, and within that domain there are photographers who excel and command my admiration. But this is still very far from an aesthetics that could intervene in the field of images or figures of Man and contribute to the creation of something that is really new, really in the process of becoming.
Well, if you are saying that art is simply a reflection of social and political ideas, how can you achieve something new? Why is new expression the goal of art? There is little proof of that.
Your other assumprtion that the artistic process is not one of becoming, then I would say you don't know anything about art. The is a main focus of the artist - being, becoming.
To my mind the documentary style of Claude Lanzmann ("Shoah") and the photography of Philippe Bazin are exemplary in going beyond the tired notion of "decisive moment".[/QUOTE]
I did some searching on Bazin. I am surprised you think this reflects your ideas. I see nothing new about his work. It shows nothing about "becoming" just what is - a decisive moment.
