< p >In 1952, A book titled “The Decisive Moment” was published in New York which became a turning point for both documentary photography and photojournalism. This book which was contained mostly with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photos soon brought the title “father of modern photojournalism’ to its own author and caused many to be absorbed by his approach of capturing photos. The idea was about the possibility and try to capture a moment in which both form and meaning would coalesce in the in highest accord possible and the photographer was supposed to catch a very fleeting moment that was inevitably unique and unrepeatable. However, the contradictions between Cartier-Bresson’s role as a photojournalist or documentary photographer and his artistic vision and his artistic stem caused some ambiguities in understanding his approach and technique. On one hand, he was a photojournalist whose photos were published in magazines as reportages of the contemporary events alongside with being the Cofounder of Magnum Photos together with photographers like Robert Capa, on the other side his artistic vision had a deep tendency toward Surrealism which was at odds with his professional role demands. Also as many of the knowledge about Decisive moment was from Cartier Bresson’s various interviews or quotations published randomly in magazines or newspapers, the problem with understanding the moment he describes faces more difficulties as his own declarations sometimes have contradictions with each other and one may deny the other totally. In Iran, due to the lack of translated sources about both Decisive Moments and Cartier-Bresson himself and also lack of availability to his interviews or written articles and books, such ambiguities have enlarged in a way which has resulted in difficulties in both understanding of the theory and using it as a practical approach. In result of such misunderstandings there are even articles that try to justify the moment as a profound philosophical incident that have neither no clear guideline as a practical approach of capturing photos nor an understanding of the visual techniques that Cartier Bresson would use. There are also articles that discuss the Decisive Moment as an act of meditation and intuition stemming from Zen Buddhism.
This article amid studying four elements including ‘Geometry’, ‘Gestalt Principles’, and ‘Spontaneity’ and ‘Chance Encounter’, the two later stemming from surrealism, tries to both define the moment clearly and also clarify its practical structure. In this article, Surrealism as the basis of Cartier Bresson’s artistic vision has been considered as the main component of his mind and based on that the spontaneity in act has been described with the targets and the reasons that are behind it in surrealistic approach. Also, the Surrealistic notion of chance encounters and discovery through the moment of revelation has been described in Cartier Bresson’s approach. Finally, the article studies the moment’s structure based on two major components which are ‘Geometry’ and ‘Spontaneity’ and the way they take place alongside ‘Gestalt Principles’ and ‘Chance Encounter’ in the attempt to coalesce the form and the meaning of a potential decisive frame