In any photograph of two people there are three people: the two in the picture, in this case the man sitting on the woman’s lap, and then there is the person behind the camera. We see the two people, smiling over something, pleased that they are there rather than somewhere else, pleased, we assume, that they are who they are rather than being somebody else. We do not see the young man who has pressed the lever to open the shutter. We do not see that he is twenty-two, that his hair is cut short, that he is wearing working trousers, that when he has taken this photograph he steps forward and shakes the man’s hand, and that the woman then stands up, dusts down her skirt, and says to him: “Thank you, Eddie.” Sometimes we can tell what the person behind the camera is thinking. Sometimes the choice of subject is so striking that it can only be the work of an attentive and sympathetic eye, attuned to the moment. In those famous photographs of men and women caught up in war—that poor girl running naked from the napalm, for instance—it is the photographer’s understanding of what is happening, his feeling for the sorrow or terror of what he sees, that gives the photograph its impact, that makes it every bit as powerful as a painting by Titian, say, or Picasso’s great indictment in Guernica.
What do You think about Chance Developments (2016)?
