∴A New Way of Looking∴

Where do you go once the Decisive Moment has passed?

“…my looking really changed, it really did become sacred. Sort of this intensity of looking at the world, and looking really closely, and photographing things that were not exciting, but things that were sort of washed with presence and with light.”

The Eastern Cape of South Africa, washed with light.

I’ve returned to this quote from writer and photographer Teju Cole a half-dozen times over the last year. By the time I first heard it I was a few years into looking for a new way to photograph. I’d started photography inspired and guided by the culture of the Decisive Moment, and I was on an endless search for images that were both balletic and exact. It was important that the images were exciting because I was trying to grab at your attention.

I spent every month of 2019 shooting a different style or subject. Looking back, I was searching for some way to photograph that felt true to me.

There are a number of photos from this time that I love, the above being one of them. But I had a growing restlessness about forcing the world into looking a certain way. I watched every scene thinking the good bit either hadn’t happened yet, or had already passed, and so I’d set up and wait for the next one to arrive. I think I misidentified this whole thing as being observant.

I sort of felt at war, like going out to photograph was going out to battle. Of course, it felt good to win sometimes. But eventually I wondered why it had to be a fight at all.

I photographed all of 2020 this way too, with everyone’s faces newly obscured and foreboding in the air, and by the end of it I knew I needed a change. I picked up a new camera and stopped going to the places I’d become used to, places where I felt guaranteed to get a photo. There was a bit of a shift in my perspective here too: I wasn’t just going out to photograph, I was going out to explore. While exploring I would photograph what captured my attention. In a way, the image was now coming to me. I became less interested by arranging things into a version of how I wanted the world to look. Instead, I became sort of mesmerized by what it is.

Another one from South Africa. Seeing it makes me think of a still Sunday afternoon when I was a kid, closed curtains lit and glowing as my parents slept.

Photographing this way may seem at first to lack the electricity of the Decisive Moment. Maybe that is because what electricity there is, is not current, but static. It’s only in moving closer that you feel its spark. There was a strange power in this kind of image for me though, and it kept me at it for a year or two before I came across the quote above.

A beautiful image of Cole’s evoking his relationship with Switzerland, a place he often returns to but where he does not live.

Listening to Cole speak, I heard described this new thing I’d been searching for and had occasionally seen and vaguely understood: photographs of presence.

I think it will be a while yet before I can define precisely what ‘presence’ in a photograph means to me. But it’s something I recognize when I see a photo that works, and I’m keeping the term in mind when I lift the camera to frame what’s grabbed my attention. After that, all that’s left is to trust the spark.

Do you have a photo of yours you feel has ‘presence’? If you do, please put a link below. I’d love to see it.

Cheers,

Chris.