The unStranded instant

Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes forever the precise and transitory instant. We photographers deal in things that are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth that can make them come back again.

---Bresson. (courtesy of anton)

From John Berger:

"His method was the antithesis of Bresson's. The photographic moment for Bresson is an instant,a fraction of a second, , and he stalks that instant as though it were a wild animal. the photographic moment for Strand is a biographical or historic moment, whose duration is measured ideally not by seconds but by its relation to a lifetime. Strand does not pursue an instant , but encourages a moment to arise as one might encourage a story to be told...

~~

His best photographs are unusually dense [where happenings are related]. The subjects are narrators.

~~

[Mr. Bennett (above)] His jacket, his shirt, the stubble on his chin, the timber of the house behind, the air around him become in this image the face of his life, of which his actual facial expression is the concentrated spirit. ..

~~

A young Rumanian peasant and his wife..above and behind them, diffused in the light, is a field and, above that, a small modern house ..Here it is not the the substantiality of surfaces which fills every square inch but a Slav sense of distance ..And, once more, it is impossible to separate this quality from the presence of the two figures; it is there in the angle of his hat..the way her hair is tied up. What informs the whole photograph-space-is part of the skin of their lives.

~~

I am as you see me.

The I am is given its time in which to reflect on the past and to anticipate its future..a life story.

northern elegy