Life happening
When I think about ‘decisive’ moments in photography they tend to include decisive happenings that come and go in an instant – a look, two moving people falling into compositional harmony, a man leaping a puddle behind Gare St Lazare, for example. These moments, that have chronologically close-coupled start and end points, are the basis of the aspirations of most street photographers. A moment captured that will never happen again in quite the same way. Passing, gone forever, Amen.
What struck me first about Helen Levitt’s work though is the length of her decisive moments. They are hardly moments at all, but happenings, occasions or circumstances – long continuous events from which she pulls a single frame. Many look as though they wouldn’t be any better or worse had they been recorded half a second before or
