Of course, it's always luck.

Cartier-Bresson coined the term the decisive moment — and in the same breath said it was, in the end, always luck. How do those two things fit together?

Henri Cartier-Bresson, co-founder of the Magnum photo agency and one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century, gave photography a term that still resonates today: the decisive moment. The idea that in every situation there is one split-second when everything comes together — composition, gesture, gaze, light — and the image tells the whole story.

The same Cartier-Bresson also said something else, which at first sight seems to contradict it:

Of course, it's always luck.

If there is such a thing as the decisive moment — if it can be sought, recognised and captured — why luck?

The answer, I believe, lies in the word itself. Luck here is not chance. Luck is providence. Chance falls on everyone equally. Providence falls on the prepared.

A photograph that truly tells a moment doesn't come (only) from chance — it comes because someone has learned for years where and when the right place might be. Which technique to choose. How to move in a space. What the camera settings need to be in that exact second. How to read people. Thousands of small decisions, conscious and unconscious, condensing into a posture long before anything actually happens.

Cartier-Bresson himself put it another way: "Photography is like archery: aim carefully, shoot quickly, get out." It sounds casual, but it is a profoundly Zen-Buddhist thought. The archer doesn't hit the target because they are strong at the moment of the shot. They hit it because they have learned, beforehand, how to breathe, how to stand, how to see. The shot itself is almost incidental.

The same is true of photography.

Being prepared means being able to accept the gift of the moment when it arrives. You can't force it. You can only move closer to a good image.

This doesn't mean professional photography surrenders itself to chance — quite the opposite. Craft means reliably delivering what an assignment requires: precise, considered, working images. That's the foundation a client can and must rely on. The decisive moment in Cartier-Bresson's sense is something beyond that — the one image that doesn't just show but tells, that outlasts the occasion. It happens more rarely. And that is precisely what makes it valuable.

That tension, for me, is the real fascination of photography. The hope for the moment, the discipline of preparation, and the letting-go that is needed to actually receive it. A photograph that succeeds is always both: craft and gift.

Or, in Cartier-Bresson's words:

Of course, it's always luck.