What's in a Photo
Photographs can tell stories. Sometimes, they tell them silently. This is an exercise in listening.
Photographs can mean many things to many people. Me, I am interested in photographs
that don't simply “show something”, but tell a story and invite you
to come up with your own interpretations of the scene that's being shown. Once
upon a while, I am lucky to capture an image that just jumps at me. Granted, these
shots are few and far between, and this is what makes them so valuable. They seem
to compress an entire story into the frame of the camera and can literally speak
to you on a level that greatly exceeds the pure fact of displaying something that
you saw when you pressed the shutter.
On my trip to New York in August 2008, I was able to capture an image that,
to me, might be one of my deepest images, one of those photos that unfold like
the layers of an onion when you take the time to look at them closely.
I was on my way to Coney Island and was riding an N-train across Manhattan
Bridge. Sitting on the left side of the train, I turned right to shoot a photo
of the New York skyline outside the train windows. What I got though was not just
that, but an image that, to me at least, tells a lot about the city and its inhabitants.
At first sight, the photo doesn't seem to be overly spectacular. It predominantly
consists of dark areas (if “dark” equals “black” for you,
you might want to check your monitor brightness), interrupted by mainly one horizontal
row of brightness that turns out to be a train window. A woman sits in the center
of the image, gazing out of the window without actually looking at anything particular.
She's got some sheets of paper in her hand and is listening to music from her
earphones. Outside the window, you can see Lower Manhattan and one of its landmarks,
Brooklyn Bridge.
New York is a city that is widely displayed in the media. You can see it every
day on television, in movies, magazines and newspapers. Most people could easily
recognize its famous landmarks, and to the keen eye, even a shot of a regular
New York streetscape will reveal hints about the city in which it was taken. New
York is ubiquitous, you could say, and it seems like everybody has an idea of
what the city is like — in their eyes and coined by the images they saw in the
media. But what's behind this facade of this famous city? How about its inhabitants,
how do they live, how do they feel about the city that they call their home?
Perhaps, this very image can tell us something about their relationship to
the city, and they city's relationship to its inhabitants.
The frame of the train window with the brightly lit cityscape outside suggests
the wide screen of a television set or movie screen. In front of it, there's just
the dark theater and the audience, represented by the woman. The cityscape, bathed
in light, moves past like a tracking shot in a movie, while the audience sits
in the dark and is really nothing more than a bystander.
This is where we get a hint at the relationship between the famous city and
its (mostly) non-famous inhabitants. There will be days when the city seems to
move past like a scene in movie, you being degraded to nothing more than a spectator.
Its almost transcendent glamour can overpower any of your aspirations and push
you down to the bottom of its urban canyons, a single ant in a colony of roughly
eight millions, insignificant, while the magic aura of its towers shines around
the globe, telling a story of glory and success — which will actually just be
the story of a few people who happened to make it to the top of the colony.
Having knowledge of this discrepancy between the famous city (which is made
up of individuals, but only appears as a single entity — “the city”)
and the insignificant individual might surely be a fact of life that New Yorkers
are aware of and that pushes them down on their knees from time to time. The threat
to anyone living in New York is that the city is able to (and probably will one
day) overpower you and make you feel small, insignificant and paralyzed, as seen
in the woman that gazes out of the window. And trying to counter this feeling,
New Yorkers may have developed their famed way of life: working hard to finally
make it to the top — from the masses of ants in the streets to the top of the
skyscrapers, striving to achieve the same level of fame that defines this city.
When I went to New York for the first time in 2007, my self imposed goal was
to capture the essence of the city in my photos, instead of the superficial scenes
that are widely known from the media and the stereotypes that are rooted in our
minds. On my second trip in 2008, I seem to have succeeded in shooting a picture
that depicts these thoughts.
Comments
Excellent post, Toby. Consider this one shared in my Google Reader items :)
I also had a look at some of your older photos -- and have shared the "Screenplay" image from the Fotomarathon Gallery. Absolutely amazing concept and photo.
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