ON PRESENCE
Sharing Our Humanity
For weeks my thoughts have been filled with the on-going wars
and they are still dominating my everyday life
like some painful distracting cry.
For a moment I want to discuss thoughts about sharing our humanity
(sharing our humanity in a way not measurable in wars)
by discussing the PRESENCE of things, places, people, events in our lives
and how that may be effectively communicated in a photograph.
People, and in particular policy-makers /politicians/the wealthy, have no idea how most people live. For me, one of my goals as a photographer
has been to tell those stories: giving those standing outside of history, a place in the great human drama.
This is not only about recognising that we are all related,
but that a truthful democracy would rely upon our appreciating
the existence of others.
To do this, I need to see into people and situations,
to place aside my own ideological notions and my taste
and to allow myself to hold contradictory notions at the same moment:
those which are inherently mine and those of others which may be alien to me
but are an intrinsic part of who they are. In other words,
contradictory but valid truths exist at the same time.
Years ago I saw a copy of a large format Italian interiors/architectural magazine called CASA, which still exists. There were several spreads on a grand palace. On one of those spreads was a white page with a large, bold name of the place (now forgotten by me); below was a smallish wide-angle photograph of the splendid room, and facing that was a whole page close-up photograph of a marble pillar’s shaft meeting its base and the floor below. Each of these were made of a differently coloured and crazed stone. What struck me was that they showed a detail as a large image revealing the essence of the space, while the small image of the whole room worked to give one a description of place. This was how essence elaborated the uniqueness of the room.
That unique showing is where poetry takes over from fact and intellectual knowledge.
From that spread I sensed perhaps the architect or builders who made the structure or the people who lived and loved there. That treatment opened me to the beauty or mere day-by-day experiences, those that define the nature of life.
Making a photograph of that connects a moment in history and the people who made/occupied it, via the image capture and then via the presence of the photographer transforming a three dimensional kinetic world into a two dimensional static representation of it.
The acquisition or photographing is only a part of one’s work.
The editing (or print making) is an indispensable part of the processes
of enunciating the presence of the image’s content.
In a portrait this is where one travels from snapshots to meaningful images
in which the viewer, via the photographer’s presence, sense the being of the subject.
The more time a photographer spends in the editing process, the more present the photographer’s attitudes, interests, tastes and skills become.
When I first worked in London as a photojournalist, I was told that my pictures,
like those of a photographer named W Eugene Smith,
one of my most important masters (exemplars of fine photography)
’stank of the darkroom’. Of course, I thought, if I can be compared to Smith,
whatever these people thought of my style, I was very proud.
But that is in part how I give presence to subject matter:
a unity between form and content