A man makes a picture
A moving
picture,Through the light projected
He can see himself up
close.A man captures
colour,A man likes to
stare,He turns his money into light to look
for
her…

-
Lemon
by U2 – from POP
(1993).My good friend
Saunders
is always trying and miserably failing to make a point. In
general; every breath, decision, heart-beat, glance etc. can be accounted for
and explained by the writings of some mad German who wanted to sleep with his
mother. I hope your getting my sarcasm (America!), anyway – in our last
semi-meaningful conversation the psychiatrists’ chair was occupied by none other
than my photographer’s finger. Why do I click so? Well, apparently it has
something to do with being a bit of a nostalgia fiend (something we’ve covered
here before) this much is true – capturing the moment being, as Kenny put it,
the Memory Man is a blast. I love to snap and organize photos in to libraries
and sets on Flickr… that part is fun too, but is probably unrelated to the
subject – i.e. taking photographs for Flickr’s sake… and I don’t do that
(honest).’Doc Saunders brought up a
further point… I take photos of some odd things; cups of steaming tea,
people’s feet, miscellaneous bedroom furniture, myself… I made the point that
no-one else was taking a photograph of it – so “why not?”. “Ah Hah!” so “you
take photographs of objects
because
no one else does!”, no, this is not the case – and I corrected her by explaining
we had reached in new plain of
stupidity…The answer is – as Bono
squeals in an elegy to Edweard Muybridge…
“Lemon“.
Photographs are sharp, on the tongue as well as the consciousness – a good
photograph (I’ve
Never
taken one) – is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second, or one
sixteenth, or one one-hundered-and-twenty-eighth. “Snap your fingers; a
snapshot’s faster. Halfway between voyeur and witness high artist and low
scum…” (-Salman Rushdie).No, I’ve
complicated everything, again. I take photographs because I can – and because
they are a relevant evolutionary step (for better or worse who knows) on the
long trail to becoming a film genius, as of now I don’t understand light and
texture and f-stops –not really. The only way I’ll become Lance
Accord a good dp is
by studying the elements of film that, when cut down to 1/24th of a second (i.e.
a frame), are most important.To
conclude this ramble for today; every poem should be a novel, every musician an
artist, every dp a photographer, every photograph a representation of one eighth
of a second, or one sixteenth, or one one-hundered-and-twenty-eighth… reality
has nothing to do with either.