The Moment
Wednesday, December 2, 2009 at 05:30PM 
Now and again I start to question how I go about taking pictures. What it is that makes me see something, and want to imprint it indelibly in my memory. Or, more importantly, what it is that makes me want to share it with others. And whether or not it's worth sharing.
I've said before that the pictures I enjoy best are the ones that make time rest for a moment, or that are several moments blurred together. The ones that can't be easily recreated. From time to time I need reminding of this.
There's something pleasing in looking at a photograph again to see that the moment that at the time seemed so fleeting and instant is now solid and kept. A moment that despite moving onward off into the distance as scripted by time is there in your hands, safe. Untouchable. As if it might start moving again at any moment.
(I had no idea I was so fond of taking pictures of people's backs until now.)
On Jim's recommendation, I recently read Geoff Dyer's The Ongoing Moment, and came out on the other side with an amazingly full and sloshing barrel of questions. What is this moment I'm trying to capture? Where was it before I got here? Did the moment exist before I was there to photograph it, did the idea of the photograph exist? Once I photograph it, is it mine? How is it anything more than colors on the screen or page?
Even more perplexing: What does it mean to call yourself a photographer? (Is everything I write these days a crisis of labels?) It seems as if everyone has a digital camera these days (though Dyer doesn't mention digital cameras until page 228, when talking about Walker Evans: "time passes through his camera. This is why it seems almost inconceivable that a picture like this could ever be taken with a digital camera."); what makes the images they capture different from yours? Is it a personal connection to the picture you're taking? Something you know outside of the photograph, a long complex story, with history, and dates, and recollections of far-off places? Or is it the individual story you're telling, a story you yourself may not even know the plot of yet?
Before I read the Dyer book, I told Jim that I believe that the difference between a photographer and someone who takes pictures is that a photographer imprints his or her emotion onto the picture itself; something exists in the photo that would not be there if someone else had taken that same photo. Nothing to do with light, or color — but with the way a house in his photographs might appear to be sighing, or a chair frustrated by passers-by in mine.
Since reading the Dyer book, I'd modify this slightly to add that it's not just the emotion embedded in the photograph, but the recognition of The Moment as exactly that. A moment when things converged, when you were thinking about that song you heard on the jukebox an hour ago, or you were distracted by something out of the corner of your eye, when you felt the chilly air on the back of your neck, lifted the camera to your eye and opened the shutter, closed it again, and said "this is a moment of my life."
This doesn't answer any of my questions; it doesn't even help me figure out whether I'm a photographer or a person who takes pictures. I think sometimes, or often, I'm both. The one thing I do know is that I am someone who fights the passage of time. I can't stand its steady, constant march. Dyer: "Photography, in a way, is the negation of chronology."
So there's that.
photography
Reader Comments (2)
Thank you. I loved this. Never commented here before, but you are on my reader, and just now i learned something, sitting in front of my notebook in Copenhagen, Denmark
Thank you. It's wonderful to hear that something I wrote had an affect on someone nearly on the other side of the world. What a time we live in.