faux Polaroid ~ (embiggenable) • iPhone
faux Polaroid ~ (embiggenable) • iPhone
THE FOLLOWING QUOTE FROM RICHARD KALVAR makes me a little crazy / perplexed...
"A photograph is what it appears to be. Already far from 'reality' because of its silence, lack of movement, two-dimensionality and isolation from everything outside the rectangle, it can create another reality, an emotion that did not exist in the 'true' situation. It's the tension between these two realities that lends it strength."
...and I could go down a long list of the crazy / perplexed whyfors however, instead, let me deal with what attracted me to the quote....
I have spent a fair amount of time ruminating about a picture's "silence, lack of movement, two-dimensionality and isolation from everything outside the rectangle." The result of that mental effort is that I believe those aforementioned characteristics of a picture are one of the medium of photography and its apparatus' most unique characteristics in all of the visual arts.
That is to write, nearly every photograph stops time inasmuch as it "freezes"-snatched from the stream of time as we perceive it-a very short-duration segment of time. The result, when viewed as a print, is what some, to incude me, might consider to be a static schematic of that particular and isolated moment / segment in time. And, assuming the picture was made by a picture maker with the intent to capture what he/she sees-to include the literal and figurative vision thing-the fact that the pictured moment in time is freed from the "distractions" of "reality"-sound, movement, surroundings, et al-the viewer of the picture can devote as much time as he/she wants to in order to "discover" what the picture is about.
That written, I am not so certain that the static schematic "create[s] another reality". Sure, the photographic print is a "real" thing and it, most definitely, is not the "real" thing depicted on the 2D substrate but I think one has to engage in a bit word parsing, re: reality, to get to the idea of another "reality".
Although, if one looks at the idea of differing realities from the picture maker's perspective (and this quote comes from a picture maker), it is possible that, inasmuch as he/she experienced both realities, there can be an emotion that results from the viewing of the static schematic which differs from the emotion experienced at the moment of the picture's making.
I can attest to the 2 separate experiences / realities idea cuz it has happened to me over and over again. While I picture "things" to which my eye and sensibiites are intuitively attracted, the fact remains that I rarely spent any time at the moment of picture making to appreciate / contemplate that which I have pictured.
That is due to the fact that, for the most part, I have little, if any, interest in the thing(s) I picture. My interest is to be found in what those things look like when pictured. That is, the static schematic. The thing I could and do contemplate for hours and do so again and again over time.