Photo Essay or Telescope or Both and Why? →

. RSS

A camera setting on a stand with a high-power lens is often just a fancy telescope, but that can be a convenient first step in gathering information about events that become photo essays. The scope can spot events, but when the picture is taken, it chooses the one image that is perhaps the best, then it may pick one that still captures the others.

Do pictures represent one event? How would that be possible since there was a before and an after and things that happened simultaneously but were missed?

You only photograph the effect of the wind: it is felt not seen →

. RSS

V

Winds come, some as powerful as that of a typhoon or hurricane, and then eventually, winds go. Even scripture will try to explain a storm.

“And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice" (1 Kings 19: 11–12)

Sometimes a photograph is like scripture, a scared record, or an essay telling the story. The wind is the horizontal motion of air caused by the pressure difference between two places. Even so, you only see current results rather than the wind itself.

“Gandhi And The Spinning Wheel”: The picture was a photo essay of his life →

Gandhi And The Spinning Wheel, Margaret Bourke-White, 1946

The photo is the essay because it conveys the spirit of peace and resistance better than words.

Gandhi said, "The spinning wheel represents to me the hope of the masses. The masses lost their freedom, such as it was with the loss of the charkha”. He was convinced that the revival of hand-spinning and hand-weaving would make the most significant contribution to the economic and moral regeneration of India

Gandhi was a prisoner at Yeravda prison in Pune, India, from 1932 to 1933. The nationalist leader made his thread with a charkha, a portable spinning wheel. The practice evolved from a source of personal comfort during captivity into a touchstone of the campaign for independence, with Gandhi encouraging his fellow citizens to make their homespun cloth instead of buying British goods.

The Photo is the Essay and shows that the power of a photo is timeless! →

On the morning of June 5, 1989, photographer Jeff Widener was perched on a sixth-floor balcony of the Beijing Hotel. The day after the Tiananmen Square massacre, Chinese troops attacked pro-democracy demonstrators camped on the plaza, and the Associated Press sent Widener to document the aftermath.

Widener assumed the man would be killed, but the tanks held their fire. Eventually, the man has whisked away, but not before Widener immortalized his singular act of resistance. Others also captured the scene, but Widener’s image was transmitted over the AP wire and appeared on front pages worldwide. Decades after Tank Man became a global hero; he remains unidentified. The anonymity makes the photograph all the more universal, symbolizing resistance to unjust regimes everywhere.