Decisive moments

As a boy, the photographer Cartier-Bresson seems to have been interested in a career in music; frustrated, however, by the demands of that field, he soon took up painting, at first under the direction of his own uncle, Louis. By the late 1920s, Cartier-Bresson was enrolled in an academy - where he began to see, and to show interest in, contemporary photography; he began to traffic with the Surrealists at the Cafe Cyrano, and then met Harry Crosby, who encouraged the Frenchman's interest in film. Life, to be sure, intruded on any purely artistic interests: Cartier-Bresson had a lengthy affair with Crosby's wife, prompting Crosby's suicide - and then, too, after Caresse ended the affair, Cartier-Bresson's flight to Africa. Feverish and near death in Ivory Coast, he wrote home and asked that he be buried in Normandy, and that a string quartet by Debussy be played as he was interred.

But he didn't die. Instead, he made his way back to Paris, where he was soon struck by a 1930 photograph by the Hungarian reporter Martin Munkacsi:

Depicting three boys on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, the image delighted Cartier-Bresson, who later recalled: "When I saw the photograph of Munkacsi of the black kids running in a wave I couldn't believe such a thing could be caught with the camera. I said, Damn it, I took my camera, and I went out into the street."

And the rest, as they say, is history. Cartier-Bresson soon became renowned for his street photography - or, more precisely, for his ability to capture what he called the decisive moment, or that creative fractions of a second when the elements of a scene converge into something especially meaningful. In the image at the top of this post, for instance, the soft rhyme between the rippled water and the iron hoops, and the poetic match between the leaping figure and the dancer in the posters beyond suggest an insistent unity that is not at first wholly evident.

I'm no Cartier-Bresson. And Cleo's never seen Lake Tanganyika. But at about 5:35 yesterday, she leaped, and I clicked. Was anything decided, in the moment? Likely not. But look: she flies nonetheless, in a manner that loosely recalls both the suspended jumper of Cartier-Bresson and the exuberance of Munkacsi's youths: