Decisive moments

How professional photographers document the world.

A boy observes Northwest Folklife Festival attendees through binoculars in Seattle, Wash., on May 26, 2019 // photo by Finn Wendt

Written by Finn Wendt

It was the esteemed French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson who coined the term ‘decisive moment.’ Armed with his trusty Leica camera, he’d wander the streets of Paris capturing life, not in posed beauty, but how it really was in the mid-20th century.

The Leica was essential to capturing candid photos since its small form factor allowed Cartier-Bresson to move around freely without drawing attention to the fact that he was taking photos.

“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,” he said in his aptly-titled photobook “The Decisive Moment.”

By trusting his eye and camera to capture these particular moments, Cartier-Bresson built a bridge between art and documentary photography that is still popular today.

And that popularity is by no accident. People feel a more personal connection with subjects of candid photography and take them as more genuine when compared to posed photos.

Currently, professional photographers utilize candid photography for countless reasons. Oftentimes it’s to capture those genuine slices of life that bring the viewer into that moment. Sometimes it’s for work, sometimes it’s for play, but it always boils down to its roots: candid photos document life.

The Human Connection

Cleveland-based photographer Doriyan Coleman found himself in the city’s art district on his second day shooting street photography. He was working on a project to document Cleveland for 30 straight days. On that warm, cloudy Saturday, he crossed paths with a woman wearing a green sweatshirt and a black-on-black Yankees hat.

Stumbling over his words and hindered by a language barrier, Coleman asked if he could take her picture. He snapped the portrait, and they went their separate ways. A man in a red car drove up to him and said “Look, man, I don’t know what you just said to her, but I’ve never seen somebody smile like that before.”

“That was the point where I was like this could be a transformative thing that actually kind of carries this butterfly effect of positivity,” Coleman reflected. “I definitely got bit by the bug.”

Finding moments to capture come intuitively to Coleman based on his own experience of the world.

“If you’re listening to one of your favorite songs, let’s say it’s talking about their parents, … they’re talking about their parents, but after a while, you can’t help but begin to see how that song relates to your life,” he said. “I wouldn’t be able to tell you that I look for three or four different subjects. A lot of it is subconscious and it’s just like an exploration of self in a lot of ways.”

He defines candid photos as pictures taken while people are going about their life, even if it involves striking up a conversation with them before or after.

A person sits under the trees at Western Washington University’s Communication Lawn in Bellingham, Wash., on March 31, 2022 // photo by Finn Wendt

Coleman traces candid photography to before cameras existed. He points toward the candid paintings produced during the Dutch Renaissance and looks even further back to Sumerian rock paintings that depicted the mundane.

“Unless you have street photographers, painters and musicians capturing this stuff, we’re never going to know anything about each other,” he said. “Capturing people in those unguarded situations I think is the truest representation of that.”

His work combines human connection and preserving those decisive moments in everyday life.

He summed it up quite elegantly: “My biggest motivations are just beauty, truth and being realistic of how the world is while at the same time being idealistic and showing how it can be. There’s a lot of glimpses of that, and without street photographers, you’d never see it.”

Capturing Action

For three decades, photojournalist Andy Bronson has covered life for different publications across Washington and Oregon. The 2007 Region 11 National Press Photographers Association Photographer of the Year now finds himself working for Cascadia Daily News in Bellingham, Washington.

He went to Washington State University interested in applying to its photography program, but upon arrival, he found that the photo classes had been canceled in lieu of PR and advertising courses, he said. It was then that he pivoted into TV broadcasting and eventually landed a job at WSU’s print publication The Daily Evergreen.

Since then, he’s been shooting for publications all around the Pacific Northwest. Beyond classic photojournalism, he fell into sports photography as that was where he could get a job coming out of college.

Sports shooters are hard to miss at events with their large camera bodies that can shoot nearly as fast as video can record and lenses longer than your forearm. Once the first pitch is thrown or the ball is tipped off, everybody’s attention is on the game and the photographer fades into the background.

Being nearly invisible in the middle of the action, the photos in the paper the next day seldom contain shots of players posing for the shot, aware of the camera. These shooters, like Bronson, can afford to sit and wait for the perfect moment, like a tiger stalking its prey, before rattling the spray of their shutters. These perfect candid captures come in a few different forms.

When Bronson goes out to cover a game, he is looking to capture story-telling moments.

“If you watch professional sports, it’s almost like a bit of a drama because they’re focusing on personalities,” he said.

Knowing the context of the game makes all the difference when finding these moments, he said. Going into a game where the top two teams in the division are going to duke it out will likely result in a different storyline than a number one team playing the number 10 team.

The Bellingham Herald Building sign stands behind barbed wire in Bellingham, Wash., on May 17, 2022 // photo by Finn Wendt

The sun was trying to peek through the clouds on a 70-degree June day in 2016 when Bronson was covering an Everett AquaSox home game for the Everett Herald. The team had just added top prospect Kyle Lewis to their lineup, so going into the game he was the story.

With that in mind, Bronson trained his camera to Lewis as the outfielder flew around third base after his teammate hit the ball into the outfield. The play was at the plate and Lewis collided with the catcher. The prospect fell to the ground in pain, nothing anybody would want to see, but it was especially disheartening to fans of the struggling Mariners organization.

But Bronson got the shot. Shortly after, Bronson’s image was at the top of an article that deflated baseball fans across the northwest.

Sometimes the storyline might change, and Bronson has to make adjustments on the fly. If a soccer game becomes extraordinarily physical, for instance, he’ll notice and look to encapsulate that, maybe with a photo of two players pushing each other shoulder-to-shoulder, he said.

At the end of the day, the type of lead shot for a sports story won’t be decided until the clock hits zero.

“Sometimes you have to go with the story shot, even if it’s not the best photo, and sometimes you get a shot of something that’s just too good to be true,” Bronson added.

He took an excellent photo of Nolan Ryan during the pitcher’s final game in the Kingdome, but unfortunately, the slide was lost to history. Fortune plays a huge role in sports photography due to its candid nature, and Bronson has mastered the skill of channeling luck throughout his tenure.

Bronson said he recently had a coversation with Lui Kit Wong, an outstanding seven-time regional NPPA Photographer of the Year and photojournalist at Tacoma’s The News Tribune, where they thought it might be better being lucky and always at the right place at the right time in lieu of being a good photographer.

“I’ve lost a lot of photos because, ‘holy mackerel, how did that person walk right in front of me at that moment?’… In some ways I’d rather be lucky and be in the right place at the right time all the time,” he said. “But a lot of stuff is just knowing the game, or knowing how it should finish and saying, ‘OK, if I’ve watched that person do x three times there’s a good chance they’ll do it on the next game and if that happens, then I’m gonna be in the right place.’”

Seeing the World

Roman Fox is a London-based street and travel photographer. He’s documented trips around the globe, capturing moments of life everywhere from the tight corridors of Jerusalem to the clacking trolley tracks of New York City’s subway. For the past three years, he’s documented his experiences on his YouTube channel.

Finding good lighting is the fundamental element in Fox’s process. Then, he’ll look to frame an interesting composition. From there, it’s a waiting game until a subject finds themselves in his frame if he’s trying to make a street portrait.

For both his aesthetic and respect, Fox said he focuses on taking photos where his subjects’ faces are obscured.

Fox, similar to Coleman, believes that candid street photography is the purest form of documenting life.

A flower-toting cat sits on its owner’s back in the shade of the University of Washington’s cherry blossom trees in Seattle, Wash., on March 30, 2019 // photo by Finn Wendt

With thousands of eyes on his work, Fox takes on a unique philosophy when it comes to taking photos that sets him apart from many fellow photographers who have added content creation to their skillset.

In an online world where algorithms translate viral content into success, he resists the urge to hunt for the perfect shot that could generate views and instead focuses on the experience of taking photos and creating a more full body of work.

His method is purist in form.

“If you take five amazing ‘banger’ photos and put them next to each other, they will all look similar and lose a lot of the appeal they had on their own. So, by having an album around it with other types of photos which might not be as strong, it creates a deeper body of work,” he said. “An album from each shoot just makes for more pleasant viewing than one ‘banger’ photo.”

He combines his process and adventures into memories that he can hold onto and share across the world.

“Candid photos for me are more rewarding because on top of actually seeing a shot, making sure the light, composition and settings are good, you also need to get the exact moment knowing that it is very unlikely to happen again,” he said. “So, it’s an extra challenge. As you do this more and more, the challenges become more difficult which is part of the fun.”