From my diary, 9th February 1983.
Sixth Avenue. A dark-haired woman rushes towards me, her hair lifted by a back draft, like Medusa’s serpents. I see her in the viewfinder, for a fraction of a second. But did I press the shutter at right moment? With the right frame, the right focus, the right speed? Sometimes I shoot this way, without having the time to check, just as not to miss an opportunity. Once in a while, in one case out of twenty (or out of a hundred), what I thought I perceived will reappear when I shall project the transparencies, miraculously, undeservedly, sometimes even improved by some small, involuntary under-exposure or by a blurred figure in the background, of which, at the ‘decisive’ moment, I may not have been aware. A gracious gift from the Goddess of Photography? But did Cartier-Bresson really see all those details he later found on his contact sheets? Perhaps, or at least more often than me: after all, he always worked with the same camera and the same lens, so that the alchemy between what he saw in his viewfinder and what he eventually found on his contact sheet was unconsciously anticipated, very much as a pianist anticipates the reactions of the chords to the touch of his fingers.
