One of the major topic of conversation amongst photographers is the concept of the “decisive moment.” This phrase, which is pretty much synonymous with Henri Cartier-Bresson, attempts to tell us that when it comes to photography, there is one particular moment like no other, and that this moment exists at the exclusion of others. The moment represents the perfect congruence of gesture, intention, and timing essential to a great photograph. It all adds up: light, composition, gesture, ambiance, and to some extent, meaning. The photographic community swears by it, and the Internet will never suffer from a lack of examples proving its existence. It has made many photographers happy and legions of them miserable. But like so many other things we hear, see, or read, once it is there in your mind, it is there for good. And no matter whether you believe in its existence or not, you just cannot pick up a camera without thinking about it. It lives in your photographic mind like an oversized neon sign on a dark night.

The problem with that decisive-moment notion is that it is generally for the observer to determine its existence. The photographer may think that it is missing from a photograph, but his audience may swear that they can see it. So, who is to determine its existence? It would not be too difficult to convince ourselves that such moments do not truly exists, that we just make them up as we go along. When you dwell on it a bit, it would appear that there is some truth to the skepticism, for if beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, then the beholder must be given some credence when they can see with their own two eyes what the photographer thought was missing from a photograph. After all, those moment, those decisive moments, are at their core an emotion, a complex, visual amalgamation of someone’s experiences and dreams.

But that is not to say that those moments are, by their very nature, the result of random processes. In fact, it could be argued that on the contrary, that those endless, little moments we sometimes capture do have a sort of structure to them. They all appear in context, or relation, to something else. Remove the context and the moment disappears. And if your photography is the kind that takes you around the world, there is no telling what that particular context that will be. It could be a wall, a chair, a view, a person, a tree, the life of the viewer at the moment, or whatever. What matters is that this so-called context will influence the interpretation of the photograph and will transport the viewer into that visual dimension that is as personal as it is situational. It is a visual and emotional symbiosis without which the viewer would be hard-pressed to find meaning in a photograph. It is the point where moment, structure, and emotions intersect in someone’s mind.

But does a photographer bear any responsibility for creating that moment? For recording what otherwise would have gone unseen and forgotten? Perhaps so, but the photographer’s capture of the moment, combined with the feelings evoked on a viewer, certainly represent visual evidence of its existence. That is why we all seem to live for those moments, for they move us by giving meaning to our lives. They make us feel. And even when we ourselves are not in a photograph, we cannot help but to personalize these scene, to place ourselves there, be it between the misery or the happiness, so that for a brief moment we can feel the rush of emotions that remind us that we are human, and that we are alive. No longer is that moment a stranger to us. It is now ours, even if we achieved it vicariously through a photograph. It has become part of our own story.