 |
The Sasse: Where love stories develop between art and viewer | ||||
|
|||||
A Secret About a Secret |
|||||
"A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know." — Diane Arbus Diane Arbus said a photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know. She was talking about what a photograph holds. She was also talking about how one gets made. Seeing comes first. Not looking. Seeing. Anyone can look at an unmade bed. Seeing it means noticing that the room is still telling a story. The covers thrown back. The pillows holding their dent. A pair of shoes side by side on the floor, pointed toward the day. Both lamps burning while morning pushes through the shutters. Nobody told the lamps the sun came up. The eye that sees all this at once is not hunting for details. It is taking in the whole room as a single sentence. Then composition does its quiet work. The bedposts frame the light. The canopy draws the eye down toward the bed like drapery in an old painting. The shoes sit near the bottom edge, small and easy to miss, which is exactly why they matter. Composition is not arranging things. The room arranged itself. Composition is deciding where to stand so the room can say what it was already saying. Inspiration gets described as lightning. It rarely is. It is more like recognition. You walk past a doorway and something stops you. You do not know why yet. The knowing comes later, sometimes years later. In the moment there is only the pull. The photographer's job is to trust the pull before understanding it. And the moment itself. We are told to wait for it. Sometimes the moment is the one just after. The subject has left the frame and everything they touched is still holding its breath. The decisive moment is not always a gesture caught mid-air. Sometimes it is an absence caught before the room notices. Who slept here? Where did they go? The photograph will not say. It gives you everything and tells you nothing. That is not a failure of the picture. That is the picture working
|
|||||
| by: Gene Sasse | |||||
|
|||||
|
|||||
