I love photos like this, ones that don't need any sort of explanation. Miami, Florida-based photographer David Taggart took this shot, which he calls Ready to Fly but what the internet has renamed Metamorphosis. It shows an elderly man walking past a street painting of a large butterfly.
“One of my all-time favorite images,” Taggart says of his shot. “This image is my interpretation of Cartier-Bresson's concept: The Decisive Moment. This occurrence came and went in a fraction of a second, and will never repeat itself.
“The picture was captured in Valparaiso, Chile where I was photographing the city's rich outdoor murals. As the man walked into the frame, I was unsure what the result would be. However, the moment yielded one of the most impactful and metaphorical images in all my years of shooting. To me, this image is the perfect convergence of man and art.”
Like Cartier-Bresson told the Washington Post in 1957, “Photography is not like painting. There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative.”
Taggart has published an e-Book titled Clicking with People which he calls “not another how-to book on lighting, photo techniques, camera hardware or post-production.” Rather, it's “about drawing the viewer into the soul of a subject through image.”
