While doing street photography, I am not looking for a decisive moment.
I wrote this text on the 26th of December, 2025. It was a day when I was doing street photography in my beloved home district, Mokotów. I took 11k steps and took over 130 photos. While doing all these things, I had a rucksack weighing 37.5 kg (83 lbs), and I wore summer clothes (including the www.adammazek.com t-shirt, winter cap, and gloves) – it was -2 degrees Celsius (28 degrees Fahrenheit). While walking among the grey, mundane Polish reality, I started to think about the legendary decisive moment. The legend among street photographers, Henri Cartier-Bresson, wrote many things about the title of this post in his book “Decisive Moment.”
I haven’t read this book, but I’ve already read many books not only about street photography, but also about the broad aspect of photography – its history, cultural and social influence, etc. In short, a decisive moment is the perfect moment to take a great shot, when everything, including the photo’s message, form, composition, etc., works perfectly.
In practice, many street photographers look for a decisive moment by finding a perfect frame to photograph. Then, they wait for a human to appear in their frame, they take a photo, et voila, they have their legendary decisive moment. I’ve been taking pictures on Warsaw’s streets for over ten years (I started doing it in October 2015). Practically, from the very beginning, in general, in most of my frames, people in my frame were disturbing me from taking a photo. Indeed, I was waiting for people to disappear from my frame. Once it is empty, I take a shot. Et voila, most of my pictures are without people.
That’s how it usually works in my case. It does not mean I do not take pictures with people in the frame. I do it. Nevertheless, from the very beginning of my adventure with street photography, I aimed to take pictures without people in my viewfinder.
