ENTRY DESCRIPTION
“In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” -- “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot
Series: "Museum Moments".
As a street photographer who’s interested in candidly capturing our human foibles, I have found museums to be particularly good hunting grounds. And while I watch museum-goers browse through the galleries, this line from Eliot’s poem often comes to mind.
Eliot was skewering the boredom and intellectual pretension that make up so much of the inflated social chatter about art, suggesting that people would rather talk of long-dead, famous artists about whom much has been written than engage with lesser lights and have to make their own judgements. Putting his cynicism aside, that has made me wonder how people actually approach art.
Do they seek something of themselves in the work? Are they at all aware that they may be subconsciously reflecting a bit of the artist’s intention? Would they be surprised to know that I have sensed a connection -- how they appear, stand, move, react -- between them and the art, and have committed what I saw to film? I feel that capturing a one-to-one relationship between a subject and an object is really what much of street photography is about, and the museum environment reduces it to its most basic, humanistic format.
AUTHOR
Few things are more exciting to me than setting out on the streets with a camera and having no idea of what I’m going to find. Unscripted street photography involves being “in the moment,” getting very close to people and becoming almost part of the scene. But I feel that, to be truly effective, a street image should convey an element of visual tension, a sense that the photographer recognized, at a visceral level, the second when the stars aligned to create just the right shot. It’s the “click point:” the unrepeatable moment that clicks in your consciousness right before you click the shutter.
Whether I’m shooting indoors or out, I try to maintain a playful, interesting aesthetic, one that invites viewers to look more than once and insert something of their own experience and imagination into the scene. Visual tension can bring with it ambiguity, giving an image depth and inviting multiple storylines to the bit of life’s theatrical business caught, at least in my case, on film.
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