A Momentary Question.

The celebrated photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, coined the phrase ‘the decisive moment’ as an umbrella term for the content of his candid photography. This is an example:

And this is one of mine (because why not?)

  

It’s interesting that the phrase should have come from a photographer because photography is probably the medium most responsible for our flawed notion that there is such a thing as an instant, and that ‘instant’ and ‘moment’ are synonymous. They’re not. There can be no such thing as an instant because time never stops flowing. Time can be infinitely subdivided because there is nothing at the end of the calculation except a value which can be further subdivided.

During the period when the shutter was opened to expose these two photographs– probably around 1/250^th of a second – something moved. Time did. And maybe that’s why Cartier-Bresson used the term ‘moment’ instead of ‘instant.’ What we see in even a static photograph is not an instant, but a small period of the passage of time.

Ah, but what about the point at which the shutter stopped being fully open and began its return to being closed? Now we’re talking about the transition from rest to movement, and here the fields of logic, mechanics and philosophy become uneasy bedfellows. Surely there is a point at which something stops being still and begins to move. So are the concepts of ‘point’ and ‘instant’ synonymous? I don’t know. I want a logician to tell me. Does anybody know one?

And I only wrote this because I had nothing better to do and it just occurred to me. I don’t suppose it’s at all important. So should I now consider how we define importance? Imagine how long that would take.