zateom
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Photography is about isolation. You halt a moment in time, put a frame around a chunk of the world, and detach it. Expand the frame and include more of the moment, the photograph and its meaning changes; reduce the frame and limit the moment, and the meaning changes again. In isolating the moment you create something that exists outside the world. You insure that people who see the photograph are looking through the moment, not just looking at it; you make that moment both specific and universal.
That’s a huge, almost magical thing to do. And yet, it’s so easy. All you have to do is push the shutter release. You can do it with deliberation, you can do it with your eyes closed, you can time it precisely, you can just take a guess, you can carefully compose what’s in the frame, you can allow for serendipity to determine what’s in the frame, you can be meticulous, you can be sloppy, you can measure the light with digital exactitude, you can ignore the light altogether. It’s incredibly easy to shoot a photograph.
It’s not easy to do it well.
This is done very well. Here we have an ordinary moment — a moment that could easily be camp and comical — a moment given weight and beauty by a simple (yet astonishingly subtle and complex) act of isolation.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
