**The Decisive Moment: A Timeless Classic of Photography**

As I delve into the world of photography, I find myself constantly amused by the notion that some people have about a photo photographic technique. This notion reveals itself in an inst insatiable craving for sharpness of images, which is often mistaken for passion. However, this obsession with sharpness is not necessarily a passion, but rather a misguided attempt to get closer to reality. The photographer, in his quest for technical perfection, may be moving away from the determination of what makes an image truly magical and what tells a story.

This brings me to the concept of pictorialism, which was largely prominent right before Bron's generation. Pictorialism was characterized by an obsession with a really shallow depth of field and a blurriness of an image to somehow make that more painterly. What I find interesting about this is that when you get obsessed with a specific technique, you're moving away from the determination of what makes an image truly special. The story behind an image, not its technical aspects, should be the focus of any great photographer.

The phrase "were these photographs taken at random by a Wandering camera do not in any way attempt to give a general picture of any of the countries to which that camera has been at large" is a poignant commentary on this point. By acknowledging that his images were not meant to capture specific locations, Bron reinforces his point about the story an image tells being independent of its context. The subject matter and people photographed are what truly make an image magical.

**The Magnum Photographer: An Introduction**

Bray Bron is indeed a great Magnum photographer who traveled the world and did just amazing feats of photojournalism. His work has been widely published, and his influence on photography cannot be overstated. However, as I delve into this book, "The Decisive Moment," I am struck by the importance of understanding the context behind Bron's work.

The print job on this book is outstanding, a testament to the quality of the printing process at its time. The pages are thick and well-bound, making this book a pleasure to hold and turn through. As I flip through the pages, I am reminded of the importance of the image itself, rather than the technical aspects of its creation.

**The Decisive Moment: A Document of Time**

For some readers, "The Decisive Moment" may exist as a document at a specific point in time that has an extreme importance associated with it. However, just about all these images have been reproduced in other publications, making this book less essential than it once was. That being said, there is another book that I would recommend which is a retrospective on Bron's work: "The Man, the Image and the World." This book provides a more complete understanding of Bron's photography and is well worth the investment.

What's also interesting about this book is the introduction, which shows us into the mind of the photographer. It's a beautiful and poignant commentary on the power of photography to capture the human experience. The pamphlet included with this book also includes a section that was left out of "The Decisive Moment," which provides a fascinating analysis of Bron's technical processes.

**Bron's Technical Processes: A Forgotten Art**

One aspect of Bron's work that is often overlooked is his own printing technique. Typically, photographers would have their work printed by third parties, but Bron took an active role in the process, even going so far as to write about it in this book. His technical processes are fascinating and provide a glimpse into the world of 20th-century photography.

In conclusion, "The Decisive Moment" is a timeless classic that continues to inspire photographers today. While some may find it essential, others may not need it, given the abundance of Bron's work available elsewhere. However, for those interested in understanding the context and technical processes behind his work, this book is an absolute must-have. Its print job is outstanding, making it a pleasure to own and display. If you're looking to invest in your photography collection, "The Decisive Moment" is an essential addition that will only appreciate in value over time.

**Investing in Photography**

If you're interested in investing in photography, there are other books and publications available that may be less expensive than "The Decisive Moment." However, for those who want to own a rare and beautiful book, this one is worth considering. Bron's work has stood the test of time, and his influence on photography continues to be felt today.

**Conclusion**

As I wrap up my thoughts on "The Decisive Moment," I am reminded of the importance of understanding the context behind great photography. By studying Bron's work, we can gain a deeper appreciation for the power of images to capture the human experience. The print job on this book is outstanding, making it a pleasure to own and display. While some may find it essential, others may not need it, given the abundance of Bron's work available elsewhere. However, for those who want to invest in their photography collection, "The Decisive Moment" is an absolute must-have.

**Recommendation**

If you're interested in purchasing a copy of "The Decisive Moment," I highly recommend it. This book provides a unique insight into the world of 20th-century photography and is well worth the investment. Its print job is outstanding, making it a pleasure to own and display. While some may find it essential, others may not need it, given the abundance of Bron's work available elsewhere. However, for those who want to invest in their photography collection, "The Decisive Moment" is an absolute must-have.

In conclusion, "The Decisive Moment" is a timeless classic that continues to inspire photographers today. Its print job is outstanding, making it a pleasure to own and display. While some may find it essential, others may not need it, given the abundance of Bron's work available elsewhere. However, for those who want to invest in their photography collection, "The Decisive Moment" is an absolute must-have.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up everybody welcome back to the show in this video I want to take a look at what is probably one of the most important photography monographs ever produced and of course this is HRI K Bron's the decisive moment this was produced in the early 1950s and this version is actually the reissue version that stle did earlier this year stle I think is one of the most important um book publishers for photography monographs around today they're doing some wonderful work historically and with contemporary photographers and they did the reissue of the decisive moment which it original pressing only had 10,000 copies and it is really hard to find now so I think it's really cool that style reissued this the reissue is fantastic and what I want to do in this video today is take a look at this and show you guys um I what I believe makes this book is Robert Kappa called it a Bible for photographers and it really is impressive and quite amazing um the book comes with the original matis artwork it kind of looks like it did when it was originally released and it comes actually in two parts uh when you take slip case off you get the reissue of the book and uh that's this part right here and then you also get this little you know pamphlet book which is sort of behind the scenes and I think in a lot of ways it's really cool cuz it acts as a little bit of a Lynch pin um in terms of understanding the importance of this book and learning a lot of behind the scenes about it too which actually is quite fascinating the book came about as a collaboration hre cart Bron had attempted to do several books prior to this this book books release in fact there was a project with uh Jean CTO That Never Was realized and there were two others and then finally the decisive moment was the first one that actually came about and it began the whole book is largely a collaboration among a bunch of people but the book actually initially was a collaboration between K Bron and a French designer who went by the name terad uh terad is seen in this photo here holding up the um the original artwork and I'll talk about some of this in a minute now terod had been publishing a magazine called Verve which was an art publication at the time and hre C Bron had a really interesting career in that he he moved between the world of photojournalism which we he was firmly committed to and also the world of Fine Art and in hre C Bron's own words and you hear a lot of people who are hardcore Street photographers um say this but essentially photographs yes they are reproduced as prints and Prince hanging in a gallery are interesting but more important to him was the magazine work that he was doing because it was more widely accessible to people you didn't have to go into an exhibition to see it remember this is way before the internet and more so than a magazine he felt that there was a permanence in books that felt more like a permanent exhibition of work so he was really into the idea of doing a book he felt that magazines as important as they were for distribution purposes ended up in the trash bin most of the time whereas a book was meant to be saved and kept and it ended up acting as a bit of a permanent exhibition and so anyway he had done some work in The Verve Magazine with with terad and he was approached by terot about producing a monograph which ended up becoming the decisive moment um matis the cover on this is really interesting too and I'll talk about that for a second it goes into great detail in here but matis you have to understand I don't know if you guys can see this I'm going to hold it up so you can you can see it a little better um but this is an image of terot holding up the original cover and you can kind of see in this um how past up works and of course this was the days before we did publishing on a computer and past up was a way of actually pasting things together life siiz in what was ultimately going to become the final book design and so the lines you see of the paper Crossing you know are not are not there in the final reproduction but that is actually the mockup of the cover which was used and what's interesting about this is matis was chosen for this which is pretty bold on several levels first of all this is a photography monograph so we're having a famous artist do the cover and the real reason of why that decision was made um by TI OD was that he and Richard Simon from Simon and Schuster felt that having matis do the cover matis had done several monographs that were very popular and having him do the cover possibly gave it a little more sales appeal matis worked in a style that of gou paper cutouts where literally he would draw with a pair of scissors and actually cut out these elements and past them on here matis that was a you know major Hallmark of his style the matis estate is quoted in this introduction to the book as saying the representative of elements here are this would be the Sun up in the upper right hand corner a mountain range in the leftand corner a bird with something a branch in his mouth and then you just have kind of these vegetative figures down here and the rectangle could possibly represent water or a lake or something of that nature I think what's also cool about this is in mati's own handwriting he went out and titled the book and photography by hre C Bron it was also interesting that a lot of people point out the omission of The Hyphen in K Bron and this is overanalyzed quite a bit I think what it comes down to is if you are a book editor you do not send back work to matis to correct that's just simply not done so anyway it's kind of interesting anyway a lot of people have made comments on this in fact the photographer minor white uh mentioned that the photographer that the cover here was actually just as delightful as it was inappropriate for photography monograph but needless to say that that's where the work on the cover comes up also interesting about this is they talk about the titling of the book and I think this is kind of key too because you know carton used that term the decisive moment and we often associate that term with carton but that was not the original working title of the book in fact there is a section in here and I'll hold this up so you can see it this is a a typed version that that kab brason did himself of all the possible book titles on this and they're all or most of them in different ways are trying to describe uh his style of working and in fact one of the ideas was this whole idea of tiptoeing um in French it's apad deop um and meaning the way that you would carefully bring the camera into a situation trying not to be observed or trying not to let what's going on be influenced by the fact that it's being photographed which I thought was interesting the French version there are actually two versions of this book the one that was released in France was titled image alet which doesn't translate very well into English it literally means images on the sly which you know like many expressions in French and in English they don't match up very well they sound very strange actually when you trans at them so Bon was having a hard time with this and eventually he found a quote from Cardinal durett and it talks about it in here that was published posthumously in 1717 where he went on to say there is nothing in this world that does not bear a decisive moment and I think at that point brison realized that this is the correct title uh for the English version of this book so it was ended up the English version was called the decisive moment I find this really interesting because it really does explain the style he was going for it talks about in here how Bron was trying to come up with an analogy for I love this is very poetic is you know the moment that the police show up to ask the street vendors to show their licenses and everybody flees you're going to get this wonderful expression of of of being startled that would be the decisive moment before they're all gone anyway it's it's quite poetic in the art world and in the photography world people fell in love with this book when it came out it was really very different than anything that had come before its time and you have to realize in the 1950s this this was a massive book to be produced um and so it was really bold um in terms of publication of how they went about this the whole thing with matis doing the cover and then this wonderful collection of Bron's images that also included text which we're going to discuss unfortunately it did not sell very well in fact I mentioned there were 10,000 copies initially printed of this book there were 3,000 of the French Edition with the imagees uh de alette and then the American version of the decisive moment only had 7,000 copies printed so it was a very rare book and it did not sell well in fact um it Simon Schuster were going to pick up a second edition of this and it didn't happen uh just because of the poor sales which is unfortunate a lot of the text in here has been reprinted since then and many times in many different Publications and of course the images can be found elsewhere um real quick before we get into the second part of this book I do want to mention our sponsor today and thank them because without them this show would not happen they allow me to produce these videos so I want to give a special shout out to the folks at lendon if you're not familiar with linda.com they offer a probably I think one of the most concise resources for video training tutorials that you're going to find anywhere it is a subscription based service I've been a member of them for years uh way before I had um you know sponsorship from them in fact they offered me a free account I still pay for it because I think Linda are worth paying for anyway if you're interested in learning anything about book publication uh so if you're interested in in design or illustrator even Photoshop or prepress or any of that stuff there are a lot of wonderful titles in Linda's massive library that you probably will find very useful on this uh particularly color correction and preparing stuff for print is particularly excellent and they've got a lot of wonderful titles in there linda.com have a deal right now for Art of Photography viewers right now where you can get 10 days of unlimited access absolutely free and what you want to do is you want to go to the following link you want to go to linda.com aop that is Linda with a Y linda.com aop that lets Linda know that I sent you and you're going to get 10 days of unlimited access absolutely free and so I want to give a special shout out and thanks once again to the folks at linda.com for sponsoring another episode of The Art of Photography I want to talk for a little bit about the decisive moment as a book and why it's such an important document in the history of photography uh what's particularly interesting is just about everything in here holds up nothing feels very dated this could have been published yesterday and everything is for the most part still relevant um it's a very interesting book it is largely the pacing of the images in here is largely chronological and basically put into two sections there are 63 images which span a total of 68 pages you have a couple two-page spreads and it's divided into two parts the first part of the book are images largely taken um you know being chronological earlier in Europe and the second part of the book is contains images that were taken in the orient and so various countries including India and China and the the monograph most of these pictures you're probably familiar with um this book has been repurposed as I mentioned it didn't sell well on its own early on even even though it was highly respected in the art World U most of these images are classic images very famous that are easy to find in other Publications today and having said that what I think is interesting is how this works as a book and you have a preface in here that was written by K Bron himself in fact K Bron wasn't crazy about writing about technique and his purpose and Richard Simon from the publisher wanted a technical document to accompany the book for photographers and they were kind of in a little bit in disagreement of how that was going to work and in the end it ended up that um Kat bran worked with an editor and did this first section which is extremely important I think is and this is what makes it a Bible of Photography and in the end in the very last section you do see Richard Simon had this written and it was published only in the English version of this but it's a technical report to photographers this part is a little bit dated and you know an all fairness it really wasn't part of K Bron's uh original Vision but this talks a lot about black and white film 76 and the importance of using Omega and largers and it's just a little bit more of a dated uh technical perspective uh written by Richard El Simon himself but the first part of this is what's extremely important and bra Sonic gives you a brief overview in here and this has been republished several times but is a brief overview of you know how he became interested in photography um what got him started with the camera and then it goes into his aesthetic and this is where it gets extremely important he talks about um the picture story and what actually is a photographic reportage a picture story sometimes there is one unique picture whose composition possesses Vigor and richness whose content so radiates onward from it that this a single picture is worth a whole story in itself and he really talks um somewhat poetically but also very practically about his method of making images the important part that it comes into where he talks about the subject he talks about composition and I have covered Bron on this show before in terms of composition it was pretty early on it's been a while and then I also used Ron's images when I talked about geometry and composition in a series that I did probably about 2 years ago which I would really love to update and because I think they could be done a little bit better now and I'll come back to that later but um one of the things that I always get is response from people whether it be comments or I've actually had people email me um when we start to get into angles geometry leading lines and they say well you're just drawing triangles on there there's no way the photographer could have considered that thought about it and we do know that K Bron was classically trained as a visual artist but he actually States in here the importance of geometry in composition and I think the important part in here and the important takeaway is what Bron teaches us right from his own pen and he says under composition if a photograph is to communicate its subject in all its intensity the relationship of form must be rigorously established photography implies the recognition of a rhythm in the world of real things what the eye does is is to find and focus on the particular subject within the mass of reality what the camera does is simply to register upon film the decision made by the eye so I think in many ways yes there are geometric elements and there are um there are basically guidelines that that make sense out of chaos and that's what composition is there are relationships between things in the picture and these relationships are important there are ways that you lead the eye through and these are very important in telling your story what C Brant is saying in this last sentence where upon the final decision made by the eye is that It ultimately you learn these things and then you have to follow through based on gut reactions and that's where the photographer comes into play he even goes on to say that you know even when you're using the Golden Rule here um the last thing you would ever want to do is etch that into the ground glass on a camera or make that a guideline for people to follow the other thing that I'm going to mention before I wrap this up here is when when cart Bron's talking about technique and I think this is really interesting to he talks about an obsession that photographers have and this would have been mid-century 1950s of you know sharpness in a shot and you know the technique involved in the dark room and getting too wrapped up in this thinking that that is going to make a great image and he said this is just as silly and I'll have to put this in a little bit of historical context but the last paragraph and and he says um I am constantly amused by the notion that some people have about a photo photographic technique a notion which reveals itself in an inst insatiable craving for sharpness of images is it passion is sorry is this the passion of an obsession or do these people Hope by this Trump do technique to get closer to grips with reality in either case they are just as far away from the real problem as those that the Elder generation which used to endow all of its photography antidotes with an intentional unsharpness such as what would be deemed to be artistic and what he's referring to is pictorialism which was largely prominent right before um Bron's generation where there was this obsession with a really shallow depth of field and a blurriness of an image to somehow make that more painterly and what brason is telling us in here is that when you get obsessed with a specific technique you're moving away from the determination of what makes an image really magical and what tells a story and I think that that's really important the last thing I want to wrap this up on right before you get into the images um is a little pull quote he says were these photographs taken at random by a Wandering camera do not in any way attempt to give a general picture of any of the countries to which that camera has been at large and I think this is a really interesting poetic way of putting this of course he is acknowledging that these are exotic locations by saying don't pay attention to that but I think he's reinforcing his point is that the story of an image is not dependent on location it's not dependent on anything but the people you're photographing and the subjects and the story you're telling and I think that's such a beautiful way of expressing ressing that even though we all know hre CER Bron is this great Magnum photographer who traveled the world and did these just amazing feats of photojournalism anyway the images are amazing in here the print job on this is outstanding now here is the burning question here would I recommend you track down a copy of the decisive moment and it all depends um the decisive moment exists as a document at a specific point in time that has an extreme importance associated with it having said that just about all these images have been reproduced in other Publications in fact there is another book that I would recommend which is a retrospective this on the man the image and the world the man the image and the world which is much more complete in terms of what is in here and the photography that's included um the beautiful introduction that I'm am going on so much about which I think is just so important because it's really um you know shows us into the mind of the photographer this has been republished on occasions in fact what's also interesting and the the pamphlet tells us about this too is there was a section that was left out where there was actually a geometrical um analysis by Bron's own work I'll show this to you here so um you know that's what he was thinking and this was actually omitted and runed into this um Schuster had asked for that but said no no I want a very technical and so that's why he wrote the thing at the end about developer and en largers which is interesting because I don't think Bray is really renowned as a printer as much as he was was just an amazing photographer um usually had third parties do his printing but anyway so would I recommend this well if you were interested in this book as a historical document it is wonderful to revisit I pull it off the shelf I bought it last summer and I can't tell you how much enjoyment I've gotten out of this I think style did such a great job to me there is just kind of a classic Aura of this book um it's already getting hard to find is I'm not sure that if they're going to print another um run of the reissue or not um it will hold its value if you feel like you want to invest in something like this in fact it probably will go up in value probably not as much as if you had an original copy of the decisive moment but it is a wonderful book and so your Mage is just going to vary as to whether or not this is something that you see in your collection for me it was essential but I think if you're just interested in K Bron essays or photos there are other places that you can find those as well which may be a little less um a little easier on your wallet if you know what I mean but anyway that's about all I've got for today I hope you guys enjoyed this episode and uh leave a comment below if you have any thoughts on this and until the next time I'll catch you guys in the next video laterwhat's up everybody welcome back to the show in this video I want to take a look at what is probably one of the most important photography monographs ever produced and of course this is HRI K Bron's the decisive moment this was produced in the early 1950s and this version is actually the reissue version that stle did earlier this year stle I think is one of the most important um book publishers for photography monographs around today they're doing some wonderful work historically and with contemporary photographers and they did the reissue of the decisive moment which it original pressing only had 10,000 copies and it is really hard to find now so I think it's really cool that style reissued this the reissue is fantastic and what I want to do in this video today is take a look at this and show you guys um I what I believe makes this book is Robert Kappa called it a Bible for photographers and it really is impressive and quite amazing um the book comes with the original matis artwork it kind of looks like it did when it was originally released and it comes actually in two parts uh when you take slip case off you get the reissue of the book and uh that's this part right here and then you also get this little you know pamphlet book which is sort of behind the scenes and I think in a lot of ways it's really cool cuz it acts as a little bit of a Lynch pin um in terms of understanding the importance of this book and learning a lot of behind the scenes about it too which actually is quite fascinating the book came about as a collaboration hre cart Bron had attempted to do several books prior to this this book books release in fact there was a project with uh Jean CTO That Never Was realized and there were two others and then finally the decisive moment was the first one that actually came about and it began the whole book is largely a collaboration among a bunch of people but the book actually initially was a collaboration between K Bron and a French designer who went by the name terad uh terad is seen in this photo here holding up the um the original artwork and I'll talk about some of this in a minute now terod had been publishing a magazine called Verve which was an art publication at the time and hre C Bron had a really interesting career in that he he moved between the world of photojournalism which we he was firmly committed to and also the world of Fine Art and in hre C Bron's own words and you hear a lot of people who are hardcore Street photographers um say this but essentially photographs yes they are reproduced as prints and Prince hanging in a gallery are interesting but more important to him was the magazine work that he was doing because it was more widely accessible to people you didn't have to go into an exhibition to see it remember this is way before the internet and more so than a magazine he felt that there was a permanence in books that felt more like a permanent exhibition of work so he was really into the idea of doing a book he felt that magazines as important as they were for distribution purposes ended up in the trash bin most of the time whereas a book was meant to be saved and kept and it ended up acting as a bit of a permanent exhibition and so anyway he had done some work in The Verve Magazine with with terad and he was approached by terot about producing a monograph which ended up becoming the decisive moment um matis the cover on this is really interesting too and I'll talk about that for a second it goes into great detail in here but matis you have to understand I don't know if you guys can see this I'm going to hold it up so you can you can see it a little better um but this is an image of terot holding up the original cover and you can kind of see in this um how past up works and of course this was the days before we did publishing on a computer and past up was a way of actually pasting things together life siiz in what was ultimately going to become the final book design and so the lines you see of the paper Crossing you know are not are not there in the final reproduction but that is actually the mockup of the cover which was used and what's interesting about this is matis was chosen for this which is pretty bold on several levels first of all this is a photography monograph so we're having a famous artist do the cover and the real reason of why that decision was made um by TI OD was that he and Richard Simon from Simon and Schuster felt that having matis do the cover matis had done several monographs that were very popular and having him do the cover possibly gave it a little more sales appeal matis worked in a style that of gou paper cutouts where literally he would draw with a pair of scissors and actually cut out these elements and past them on here matis that was a you know major Hallmark of his style the matis estate is quoted in this introduction to the book as saying the representative of elements here are this would be the Sun up in the upper right hand corner a mountain range in the leftand corner a bird with something a branch in his mouth and then you just have kind of these vegetative figures down here and the rectangle could possibly represent water or a lake or something of that nature I think what's also cool about this is in mati's own handwriting he went out and titled the book and photography by hre C Bron it was also interesting that a lot of people point out the omission of The Hyphen in K Bron and this is overanalyzed quite a bit I think what it comes down to is if you are a book editor you do not send back work to matis to correct that's just simply not done so anyway it's kind of interesting anyway a lot of people have made comments on this in fact the photographer minor white uh mentioned that the photographer that the cover here was actually just as delightful as it was inappropriate for photography monograph but needless to say that that's where the work on the cover comes up also interesting about this is they talk about the titling of the book and I think this is kind of key too because you know carton used that term the decisive moment and we often associate that term with carton but that was not the original working title of the book in fact there is a section in here and I'll hold this up so you can see it this is a a typed version that that kab brason did himself of all the possible book titles on this and they're all or most of them in different ways are trying to describe uh his style of working and in fact one of the ideas was this whole idea of tiptoeing um in French it's apad deop um and meaning the way that you would carefully bring the camera into a situation trying not to be observed or trying not to let what's going on be influenced by the fact that it's being photographed which I thought was interesting the French version there are actually two versions of this book the one that was released in France was titled image alet which doesn't translate very well into English it literally means images on the sly which you know like many expressions in French and in English they don't match up very well they sound very strange actually when you trans at them so Bon was having a hard time with this and eventually he found a quote from Cardinal durett and it talks about it in here that was published posthumously in 1717 where he went on to say there is nothing in this world that does not bear a decisive moment and I think at that point brison realized that this is the correct title uh for the English version of this book so it was ended up the English version was called the decisive moment I find this really interesting because it really does explain the style he was going for it talks about in here how Bron was trying to come up with an analogy for I love this is very poetic is you know the moment that the police show up to ask the street vendors to show their licenses and everybody flees you're going to get this wonderful expression of of of being startled that would be the decisive moment before they're all gone anyway it's it's quite poetic in the art world and in the photography world people fell in love with this book when it came out it was really very different than anything that had come before its time and you have to realize in the 1950s this this was a massive book to be produced um and so it was really bold um in terms of publication of how they went about this the whole thing with matis doing the cover and then this wonderful collection of Bron's images that also included text which we're going to discuss unfortunately it did not sell very well in fact I mentioned there were 10,000 copies initially printed of this book there were 3,000 of the French Edition with the imagees uh de alette and then the American version of the decisive moment only had 7,000 copies printed so it was a very rare book and it did not sell well in fact um it Simon Schuster were going to pick up a second edition of this and it didn't happen uh just because of the poor sales which is unfortunate a lot of the text in here has been reprinted since then and many times in many different Publications and of course the images can be found elsewhere um real quick before we get into the second part of this book I do want to mention our sponsor today and thank them because without them this show would not happen they allow me to produce these videos so I want to give a special shout out to the folks at lendon if you're not familiar with linda.com they offer a probably I think one of the most concise resources for video training tutorials that you're going to find anywhere it is a subscription based service I've been a member of them for years uh way before I had um you know sponsorship from them in fact they offered me a free account I still pay for it because I think Linda are worth paying for anyway if you're interested in learning anything about book publication uh so if you're interested in in design or illustrator even Photoshop or prepress or any of that stuff there are a lot of wonderful titles in Linda's massive library that you probably will find very useful on this uh particularly color correction and preparing stuff for print is particularly excellent and they've got a lot of wonderful titles in there linda.com have a deal right now for Art of Photography viewers right now where you can get 10 days of unlimited access absolutely free and what you want to do is you want to go to the following link you want to go to linda.com aop that is Linda with a Y linda.com aop that lets Linda know that I sent you and you're going to get 10 days of unlimited access absolutely free and so I want to give a special shout out and thanks once again to the folks at linda.com for sponsoring another episode of The Art of Photography I want to talk for a little bit about the decisive moment as a book and why it's such an important document in the history of photography uh what's particularly interesting is just about everything in here holds up nothing feels very dated this could have been published yesterday and everything is for the most part still relevant um it's a very interesting book it is largely the pacing of the images in here is largely chronological and basically put into two sections there are 63 images which span a total of 68 pages you have a couple two-page spreads and it's divided into two parts the first part of the book are images largely taken um you know being chronological earlier in Europe and the second part of the book is contains images that were taken in the orient and so various countries including India and China and the the monograph most of these pictures you're probably familiar with um this book has been repurposed as I mentioned it didn't sell well on its own early on even even though it was highly respected in the art World U most of these images are classic images very famous that are easy to find in other Publications today and having said that what I think is interesting is how this works as a book and you have a preface in here that was written by K Bron himself in fact K Bron wasn't crazy about writing about technique and his purpose and Richard Simon from the publisher wanted a technical document to accompany the book for photographers and they were kind of in a little bit in disagreement of how that was going to work and in the end it ended up that um Kat bran worked with an editor and did this first section which is extremely important I think is and this is what makes it a Bible of Photography and in the end in the very last section you do see Richard Simon had this written and it was published only in the English version of this but it's a technical report to photographers this part is a little bit dated and you know an all fairness it really wasn't part of K Bron's uh original Vision but this talks a lot about black and white film 76 and the importance of using Omega and largers and it's just a little bit more of a dated uh technical perspective uh written by Richard El Simon himself but the first part of this is what's extremely important and bra Sonic gives you a brief overview in here and this has been republished several times but is a brief overview of you know how he became interested in photography um what got him started with the camera and then it goes into his aesthetic and this is where it gets extremely important he talks about um the picture story and what actually is a photographic reportage a picture story sometimes there is one unique picture whose composition possesses Vigor and richness whose content so radiates onward from it that this a single picture is worth a whole story in itself and he really talks um somewhat poetically but also very practically about his method of making images the important part that it comes into where he talks about the subject he talks about composition and I have covered Bron on this show before in terms of composition it was pretty early on it's been a while and then I also used Ron's images when I talked about geometry and composition in a series that I did probably about 2 years ago which I would really love to update and because I think they could be done a little bit better now and I'll come back to that later but um one of the things that I always get is response from people whether it be comments or I've actually had people email me um when we start to get into angles geometry leading lines and they say well you're just drawing triangles on there there's no way the photographer could have considered that thought about it and we do know that K Bron was classically trained as a visual artist but he actually States in here the importance of geometry in composition and I think the important part in here and the important takeaway is what Bron teaches us right from his own pen and he says under composition if a photograph is to communicate its subject in all its intensity the relationship of form must be rigorously established photography implies the recognition of a rhythm in the world of real things what the eye does is is to find and focus on the particular subject within the mass of reality what the camera does is simply to register upon film the decision made by the eye so I think in many ways yes there are geometric elements and there are um there are basically guidelines that that make sense out of chaos and that's what composition is there are relationships between things in the picture and these relationships are important there are ways that you lead the eye through and these are very important in telling your story what C Brant is saying in this last sentence where upon the final decision made by the eye is that It ultimately you learn these things and then you have to follow through based on gut reactions and that's where the photographer comes into play he even goes on to say that you know even when you're using the Golden Rule here um the last thing you would ever want to do is etch that into the ground glass on a camera or make that a guideline for people to follow the other thing that I'm going to mention before I wrap this up here is when when cart Bron's talking about technique and I think this is really interesting to he talks about an obsession that photographers have and this would have been mid-century 1950s of you know sharpness in a shot and you know the technique involved in the dark room and getting too wrapped up in this thinking that that is going to make a great image and he said this is just as silly and I'll have to put this in a little bit of historical context but the last paragraph and and he says um I am constantly amused by the notion that some people have about a photo photographic technique a notion which reveals itself in an inst insatiable craving for sharpness of images is it passion is sorry is this the passion of an obsession or do these people Hope by this Trump do technique to get closer to grips with reality in either case they are just as far away from the real problem as those that the Elder generation which used to endow all of its photography antidotes with an intentional unsharpness such as what would be deemed to be artistic and what he's referring to is pictorialism which was largely prominent right before um Bron's generation where there was this obsession with a really shallow depth of field and a blurriness of an image to somehow make that more painterly and what brason is telling us in here is that when you get obsessed with a specific technique you're moving away from the determination of what makes an image really magical and what tells a story and I think that that's really important the last thing I want to wrap this up on right before you get into the images um is a little pull quote he says were these photographs taken at random by a Wandering camera do not in any way attempt to give a general picture of any of the countries to which that camera has been at large and I think this is a really interesting poetic way of putting this of course he is acknowledging that these are exotic locations by saying don't pay attention to that but I think he's reinforcing his point is that the story of an image is not dependent on location it's not dependent on anything but the people you're photographing and the subjects and the story you're telling and I think that's such a beautiful way of expressing ressing that even though we all know hre CER Bron is this great Magnum photographer who traveled the world and did these just amazing feats of photojournalism anyway the images are amazing in here the print job on this is outstanding now here is the burning question here would I recommend you track down a copy of the decisive moment and it all depends um the decisive moment exists as a document at a specific point in time that has an extreme importance associated with it having said that just about all these images have been reproduced in other Publications in fact there is another book that I would recommend which is a retrospective this on the man the image and the world the man the image and the world which is much more complete in terms of what is in here and the photography that's included um the beautiful introduction that I'm am going on so much about which I think is just so important because it's really um you know shows us into the mind of the photographer this has been republished on occasions in fact what's also interesting and the the pamphlet tells us about this too is there was a section that was left out where there was actually a geometrical um analysis by Bron's own work I'll show this to you here so um you know that's what he was thinking and this was actually omitted and runed into this um Schuster had asked for that but said no no I want a very technical and so that's why he wrote the thing at the end about developer and en largers which is interesting because I don't think Bray is really renowned as a printer as much as he was was just an amazing photographer um usually had third parties do his printing but anyway so would I recommend this well if you were interested in this book as a historical document it is wonderful to revisit I pull it off the shelf I bought it last summer and I can't tell you how much enjoyment I've gotten out of this I think style did such a great job to me there is just kind of a classic Aura of this book um it's already getting hard to find is I'm not sure that if they're going to print another um run of the reissue or not um it will hold its value if you feel like you want to invest in something like this in fact it probably will go up in value probably not as much as if you had an original copy of the decisive moment but it is a wonderful book and so your Mage is just going to vary as to whether or not this is something that you see in your collection for me it was essential but I think if you're just interested in K Bron essays or photos there are other places that you can find those as well which may be a little less um a little easier on your wallet if you know what I mean but anyway that's about all I've got for today I hope you guys enjoyed this episode and uh leave a comment below if you have any thoughts on this and until the next time I'll catch you guys in the next video later\n"