Rail station rooftops. A billboard. Rubble. A wheelbarrow. The repetition of an iron fence. It is 1932, and a man in silhouette is apparently walking on water. His reflection in a large puddle below is undisturbed, but not for long. We will never see the motion of the ripples caused by his weight on a prone ladder used as a bridge. This is Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photograph "Behind the Gare St. Lazare."

A colorful collage of houses pile out to the horizon as if they were dropped from the sky. Ruined vehicles, debris and destruction fill the foreground. It is 2005, and Hurricane Katrina has inundated New Orleans. Krista Jurisich’s "The Houses are Crying II" is a quilt that surrounds the central image of destruction with small cropped photographs of the spray-painted "x-codes" with which search-and-rescue teams marked buildings.

The same year, Soo Kim travels to Reykjavik, Iceland, and photographs the city’s landscape. She hand-cuts and manually combines different photographs to create a colorful but dissonant landscape of angles akin to Jurisich’s vision of New Orleans.

This has been just one possible cross-section of the work in "Decisive Moments," featuring photographs from the collection of Cherye and James Pierce. The exhibit runs through June 8 at the Hono­lulu Museum of Art.

Developed over the course of their 40 years of marriage, these images are not just investments; they are intimate reflections and documents of their relationship.

This is a dense show featuring a vast array of subject matter that ranges from traditional black-and-white photography to digitally manipulated color prints. Though not explicitly organized by an overarching theme or category, the works have been arranged in areas of related intensity such as post-Katrina New Orleans, the urban landscape, the female form and portraits built of other images.

The sheer diversity of the collection invites a constant renewal of the wonder in the suspended photographic moment. To this day, photography differs from all other visual arts because it is based on an objective instant of reality. Each piece, whether a snapshot or an elaborate setup, buzzes with the aesthetic, conceptual and at times political complexity that art theorists, critics and historians have been debating for decades.

The digital democratization of photography not only guarantees that most people can join this discourse, it means that they likely have at least one "miraculous" image akin to Cartier-Bresson’s puddle jump somewhere on a hard drive. At the same time, the proliferation of the "selfie," or the still life of one’s lunch or cocktails, seems to homogenize the "decisive moment," especially when it is tied to instantaneous social reactions.

The Pierces themselves are not on display, but this is a showcase of their tastes that the viewer is expected to admire. For even though "everyone" is free to collect and share his or her favorite images, actually owning them remains an entirely different game.

It is therefore an interesting time for anyone, but especially the young digital types, to explore this public display of the Pierces’ intensely personal record of their passion for photography. A generation has come of age with phones in their pockets, the capacity to dispense instant judgment, and the practice of "curating" via tools like Tumblr and Pinterest. That demographic in particular would do well to see what it means to select, collect, live — and love — with physical objects of art.