Some photos haunt me. None more than this one. It was taken behind our house in Nashua, New Hampshire, circa August 1958, seven months before our family moved to Florida. My two brothers and I posed for our mother, and judging from our expressions, we hadn’t yet reached the stage of reflexive smart-ass resistance to any family formality.
Thanks to technology at the time, she had to shoot the image while holding the camera at her waist and looking down at the view finder. (This camera looks familiar to what she used in those years, familiar at least to a memory clouded from a half-century and more gone by.) Thus her shadowed figure also looks posed, the image of someone watching us rather than an amateur photographer guilty of a common composition error. With no outline of her hands holding the camera, it’s easy to imagine them clasped in front of her over a late summer dress, and her eyes cast not downward but fixed on her sons.
What prompted the photograph, the mood of the moment, and what was happening in our lives that day are questions whose answers — likely inconsequential — are gone forever. I’m certain that our mother never pictured me staring at the photo so many decades later, enthralled not with our youth or our brotherhood or the memories her snapshot awakens. What haunts me now is the accidental but enduring vestige she bequeathed. Not merely a shadow persisting on faded film long after her death but a presence hovering over us still, a presence always there, no matter the location, no matter the light.
Isn’t the appeal of this photo the immediate emotional response it triggers? And that response, different for every viewer, likely has nothing to do with the moment captured or starkly beautiful landscape or its inhabitants. I guess that’s why it ranked first in this contest.
I can’t stop looking at photos of 178 people taken during 20 days from the same spot on a Berlin railroad bridge. The image of disconnected lives artistically stitched together into a very long, single picture is called “We’re All Gonna Die — 100 meters of existence.”
Scrolling through this gaggle of humanity is strangely mesmerizing. Few noticed the camera of Simon Høgsberg and thus are captured in mundane moments. Nothing is happening. Or so it seems until you linger on faces and imagine what the lens couldn’t see. Who are these people? What are they thinking? How did they come to be there? Where are they going?
Upon third viewing, I pictured myself in the picture.
One of my favorite web sites is proof once again that simple ideas can produce breathtaking results. The Big Picture, a seven-month-old photo-journalistic blog of the Boston Globe, demonstrates how so-called old media can do a much better job via new media. Too bad that truth has taken so long to sink in. (I worked on the print side of newspapers for many years before moving to the online side in the heady, pioneering days of the 1990s.)
Two recent features, each with more than two dozen stunning photographs, are stark reminders that the United States is waging two wars in distant lands. The pictures make real what for most of us are distant abstractions in Iraq and Afghanistan. These collections of well-composed single images pack more wallop than any video. They create a lingering truth, a truth not easily blinked away.
When I first saw Jason Tozer’s photographs, including this one used with his permission, I thought they were from a newly discovered solar system.
Tozer’s work is a stunning reminder that we think we see so much so clearly but actually see little. Hidden worlds abound at our fingertips, their existence beyond our grasp.
I’ll never think of my little boy‘s bubbles from a bottle the same again as they waft past on a warm breeze, Jupiters and ringless Saturns adrift.
You can learn more about how Tozer shot his images here.
