Valencia,

1933, printed later

The tentative contact that this boy makes with the disfigured wall beside him has led many to read Valencia as a portrait of a boy isolated by blindness; however, Cartier-Bresson later explained that the child was simply watching a rubber ball that had bounced beyond view of the camera. In his landmark book Images à la Sauvette, later titled The Decisive Moment, the artist presented a mode of photography that uncannily captured spontaneous yet perfectly harmonious instances of movement and interaction. A more literal translation of the book’s title, "images on the sly," underscores the artist’s emphasis on orchestrating visual and poetic coherence out of real-world events.