2026 SPE Annual Conference: Catalyst for Exchange
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print this pageCartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment vs. Smartphone Photography
Bruno Chalifour
Friday, October 24 - 4:50PM to 5:35PM
Clark Theater
Most people around us use a smartphone to take photographs. In this respect they are more "photographers" than people with a pen, who rarely use it to write diaries, are "writers." If Texting, Tweeting, Facebooking do not turn one into a writer, why should a smartphone transform anyone into "a photographer?" Isn't it our task, as educator, to clearly assert what and whom a photographer is, what it really takes. All practitioners are not authors whose work is worth studying or preserving; we are fine-art educators and we need to remember that, both the "fine" and the "art" parts of it.
Ubiquity does not mean sublime. Sublime does not have to be ubiquitous. Photography is not ubiquity: one very small and specific piece of space usually recorded in a fraction of a second. Yet this infinitesimal piece of experience can, if well-understood and practiced, extend beyond the picturesque to the sublime. What have the Decisive Moment and Cartier-Bresson's eye taught us that can help our students to better understand the specificity of photography?
The ubiquity of writing or photographing machines, their easiness of use do not turn us into writers or photographers. In the light of The Decisive Moment and its introduction, 62 years after its publication and 10 years after Cartier-Bresson's death, let us revisit the term "photographer," and how this approach and practice of the medium can still provide students with a better understanding of what "being a photographer" can mean that is so different from most smartphone photography.
speaker
Bruno Chalifour
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