In Steber’s picture of the funeral, there is a miraculous unity of action. She described to me how it came about: ‘‘Like an orchestra playing a dramatic symphony, everything crescendoed at the same time. The dead woman’s son, without warning, suddenly rose up in anguish in the painful last cry of a son saying goodbye forever to his mother, and just as the last rays of sun fell on his face.’’ The opposite is true in Webb’s picture. There is no dramatic highlight; no one interacts with or even looks at anyone else. The only communicative glance is from the two boys, outward, toward us. And yet the anomie of an afternoon in the 1980s in a small, hot Haitian town is given, in this photograph, uncanny, indelible and exact form.

Webb’s is perhaps not a picture Cartier-Bresson would have liked very much, as he was skeptical of color and strong shadows. But for Webb, everything is fair game: color, shadows, a silhouette, a rock, a wall, a cigarette, a donkey’s ears, a saddle, a signboard, a hand here, a head there. Despite this freedom, everything is in its right place. Notice the repetition of an elongated rectangle: the door, the doorway, the vertical sections of wall, the lower edge of the window. Then there are the implied polygons around key figures: the silhouetted boy, the woman in the red scarf, the donkey’s ears. The same elongated rectangle, or at least one related to it by ratio, appears in various sizes and in various disguises in free geometric play throughout the picture plane.

The success of certain pictures — pictures that make the viewer say, ‘‘Damn it,’’ and wonder how such things are possible — comes from a combination of tutored intuition and good luck. Could Munkacsi, Cartier-Bresson, Steber or Webb have considered some matters of pictorial complexity at the moment they made their pictures? No question about it. But could they have seen every element at the moment they pressed the shutter? Impossible. The photographer has to be there to begin with, tuned in and tuned up, active, asking a family for permission to attend a funeral in Port-au-Prince, following a man and a donkey down the road in Bombardopolis. The rest is fate.