Light and Shadow.
Elements Interplay.
Rendering the familiar unfamiliar.
A visual deconstruction of the everyday.
Reading:
PhotoBox (ISBN 9780500543849)
Avedon, Bresson, Leibovitz, Salgado, Erwitt and company all in one book. What’s there not to like?
Walker Evans
It is interesting how a collection of repetitive photographs, of people, caught unawares on film can be such a poigant reminder of Depression-era America. The subway in itself is a temporal setting, a non-space if you may. The subway as a transitionary space which is non-relational, non-historical and or in any pretext concerned with the identity of the traveller offers an interesting juxtaposition to the commuters that it carries everyday. The placement of people of varying classes, race, religion and beliefs in this non-place renders them (albeit temporally), vulnerable to the lens of the camera, in which they are (almost) removed of their identities. This forces the viewer or reader to view them within the context of a larger structure, the superstructure in this case. Evans’ work is powerful in this sense because he is able to do precisely this. The dislocation of individuals and the stark realization of the social landscape argues for the fact that the faces he portrays are not just faces of random individuals, but rather, faces that represent an era.
