‘That fraction of a second in which everything happens at once? That’s what this photo is all about,” Stéphane Arnaud says. The global photo editor-in-chief for Agence France-Presse was in the Portuguese city of Coimbra for work, walking up a whitewashed street, when his eye was drawn to the red central caps on this car’s wheels.
“They were the only brightly coloured element on the whole street,” he says. “But just as I reached the car, this woman appeared, in her red coat.”
Arnaud says he always has his phone in his hand when he’s walking, and that his reaction was like a reflex. “I immediately stretched out my arm in her direction and hop, click-clack! It was spontaneous, instinctive,” he says.
In spite of the unplanned setup, Arnaud found that the resulting image worked perfectly. “All the elements lined up: the horizontal lines of the car echoed those of the paint on the wall; the white and red colours responded to each other; and my main subject, the woman, was in exactly the right place. It might be pretentious to call this a ‘decisive moment’, but that’s what it is.
“Moments like that don’t happen often,” he adds. “So when they do and you manage to seize them, you feel the satisfaction of a marksman who has hit his target.”
