Decisive Moments...

"...the decisive moment, it is the simultaneous recognition,
in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event
as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event
its proper expression..."

Henri Cartier-Bresson

It's probably very passe to talk rather pretentiously about the decisive moment. It's a much-abused photographic paradigm these days, it's true.

But it is a fascinating thing that the best photographers seem to know when the moment is right. Perhaps it stems from a primaeval hunting instinct. In my case, I prefer to think of photographic skill using the old principle that if you throw enough mud at a wall, some of it will stick.

Back on the north Yorkshire coast the other weekend, the tides appeared right to spend a pleasant afternoon combing the beach for some Jurassic fossil wood fragments. Hmm, not everyone's cup of tea, for sure, but perhaps it's what they represent rather than what they are now that is captivating. Well, to me, anyhow...

These wood chunks left the Jurassic coast 170 million years ago, floating out onto an azure sea. Various life forms latched onto these floating rafts and carried on the journey. Bivalve shells, crinoids. That sort of thing. Once the wood became waterlogged, these babies would sink like submarines onto the dense gloop of the sea floor, and there, covered over with more gloop, would be entombed. Walking over the shore and discovering these little life rafts seems like the unveiling of a 170 million year decisive moment, a dot in the ocean of time.

Today, all I was to find were some beautiful wood fragments, preserved in shiny pyrite. No tentacles. And that's why I ended up following a wetsuit clad surfer to a distant part of the beach, where I took some photos. It just happened that the surf was in at Staithes. The tides were right, the wind had picked up, and there were a number of black bodies in the water. Turns out that they were picking their decisive moments on one of the best surf beaches in the world.

Click on this one to make it bigger...

Complete chance or a moment of decisive knowing? Probably mostly chance. But for once, it felt like I was in the right place, at the right time.