If we know today the look of this indisputably singular person, Jean-Paul Sartre, it is often through one, remarkable photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson.^* It’s numbered Image 60, The Decisive Image, and indexed, “Jean-Paul Sartre on the Pont des Arts, Paris, 1946.”²⁶ The name can transpose for the image (tracking a form/form move in our grammar of multimodality), or the image for the name.

I had just discovered the Leica. It became an extension of my eye, and I have never been separated from it since I found it. I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung up and ready to pounce, determined to “trap” life – to preserve life in the act of living … Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes forever the precise and transitory instant.²⁷

Instantiation is realized in an instant, and from the point of view of context, the instance is one that is never quite repeatable. But the instantiation always fixes something quite definitive. In this case, at this instant in 1946, the singularity of Sartre was “trapped.” It’s unequivocally, unambiguously Jean-Paul Sartre, so we are told, and of course, the famous Jean-Paul Sartre and none other. There is no reason to disbelieve his singularity, represented here in name and image, the one confirming the other.

The casualness, the context-laden-ness also speaks to a certain facticity. Such was Cartier-Bresson’s art.

I infinitely prefer, to contrived portraits, those little identity-card photos which are pasted side by side, row after row, in the windows of passport photographers. At least there is on those faces something that raises a question, a simple factual testimony.²⁸

We don’t know who Sartre was speaking to in Cartier-Bresson’s photograph. We might presume that the photographer knew, and even if it happened that he did not, we can also be certain of their nameability, their findability in a register of births, and other traces of acts of instantiation that might demonstrate without a shadow of doubt their specific personhood. Cartier-Bresson, of course, may also have known this person, or not; but for the purposes of visual representation, they are not named. So, they stand out of frame, a meaningful absence pointing to the general concept of an interlocutor in existential conversation – another philosopher or a student, perhaps.

This is how particulars are ever-ready to become generalities, and how a concept might transpose for an (only possible) instantiation in an image.

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²⁶ Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1952 [2014], The Decisive Moment: Photography by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Göttingen, Germany: Steidl.

²⁷ Ibid., Introduction, unnumbered pages.

²⁸ Ibid., Introduction, unnumbered pages.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 87-88. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Henri Cartier-Bresson’s "The Decisive Image" §MS1.1.1a