Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare

Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare is a 1932 photograph by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, taken behind the Gare Saint-Lazare train station in Paris, showing a man in mid-leap over a large puddle, his form echoed by a dancer's silhouette on a poster in the background. Taken with a small handheld camera in a single fraction of a second rather than staged or posed, the image became one of the defining illustrations of Cartier-Bresson's own concept of the decisive moment, the idea that a photographer must recognize and capture a fleeting, formally resolved instant as it happens. It remains one of the most widely reproduced and studied images in the history of street photography.