Bonnard used to say “what are you after?.. why this instant?.. why press the shutter just then?”
I just answered “why did you just put this stub of yellow?”
He laughed. We knew sensibility cannot be explained.
The night when Barack Hussein Obama was elected as the new U.S. president, adding new meanings to the American identity, I prefer to look at some photographs from the past. And then accompany them with few comments of scepticism.
Keith Loutit employed and combined ’tilt-shifting’ and time-lapse photography in order to create the video below. The method of tilting the lens of the camera helped him to control the orientation of the plane of focus, and select an area of focus that deviates from the usual case, which is parallel to the camera. A large aperture was also used to achieve a very shallow depth of field. The images were manipulated so that they look like photographs of a miniature scale model and, given the high vantage point too, the scene seems much smaller than it actually is.
There is a time when not knowing what day it is feels very wrong, particularly when you end up buying the stale bread from the shelf. But most other times, it seems just fine.
There is a poem by Charles Bukowski claiming that…
there are worse things than
but it often takes decades
to realize this
and most often
when you do
it’s too late
and there’s nothing worse
There is a time when, despite being surrounded by so many people, someone feels their own body freezing out and the spirit turning into a statue from inside out. Suddenly, this time, one cannot simply move away or keep walking backwards and forwards, eagerly compensating for the time running out. In fact, those with the higher antennas might be the first ones left out; amateurs, angels, and professionals altogether… All this despite, again, that we all need – in the end – a certain level of emotional superficiality… And despite how everyone is aware that the sound of petrified legs hardly echo the most wanted and abused word at the moment, ‘friend’.
How could a body like this have a big love anyway!
“Colour expands a photograph’s palette and adds a new level of descriptive information and transparency to the image. It is more transparent because one is stopped less by the surface – colour is more like how we see. It has added description because it shows the colour of light and the colours of a culture or an age. While made in the 1980s, the palette of this image by Anne Turyn seems to date the picture a generation earlier.”
From ‘The Nature of Photographs‘ by Stephen Shore (Phaidon 2007) p.18.
Yet, while I was recently watching The Genius of Photography (Episode 4) it came as a pleasant surprise to hear how William Eggleston was described as unreadable. This is the photographer of course, who brought serious colour photography into the mainstream art world (see for example a review by Photo Book Guide).
But how photography managed to become critical and subversive within GDR’s political setting? Read more in the post “Do not refreeze” (27.07.2007). Considering how our context and definitions are different now, could photography claim a similar social and political role?