Say Cheese !

The other night – the night of the pink super moon – I looked up from the book I was reading to find that my wife was missing. Startled, I looked around the house and even checked the garage to see if she had taken the car. Numerous scenarios flashed through my mind from the possibility of her defying the stay at home orders to pick up some ice cream; to the possible fact that she had left because of my repeated, failed efforts to pick up my socks. Finally, I figured it out. She is a photographer and the moon had risen. I found her in the middle of the street with her camera on a tripod. She was poised, bent behind the eyepiece as cars made wide arcs around her.

Photographers are a rare breed. Photography is the first “modern media,” the first photograph on record was shot in 1826 by a Frenchman – one Joseph Niepce – and since that day practitioners of the art abound. We waited more that 50 years for the radio and the phonograph to come along but we could capture a frame that had the power of a gut punch. A few years later in America the work of Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner brought the carnage of of Antietam and Gettysburg to the front steps of Americans who otherwise would be unaware of the horrors of war. Photography had power. As Alfred Stieglitz once observed, “in photography, there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality. ” Subtle, yes and incredibly impactful.

My wife is an exceptional shooter and she can bore you with talk about light, composition, clarity, the rule of thirds and a host of other technicalities that lead to an exceptional shot. What she does possess in addition to technical ability is the eye for the soul of the image. Her pictures speak to you…they evoke. There are different types of photographers and their genres are often different. There are nature shooters, adventure, portrait, studio, chroniclers and war correspondents but this only describes what corner of the field they are cultivating. The central issue is whether or not their pictures have th X-factor I call soul. Photos that are technically perfect but are lacking in soul, will move no one. She has that feel.

Rosenthal’s flag raising, Eisenstadt’s Time Square Kiss, Adams’ El Capitan and the portraiture of Arbus and Liebowitz all are iconic because they capture the reality that is, ” so subtle.” They speak to us through our pores and we instantly understand. Aestheticians often debate whether photography is an art or a craft but this becomes moot if a great photographer has just knocked you on your ass. Like any art, photography has it rigors and ways to separate the hobbyist from the true practitioner.

The differentiator is in the form of a question : “how far will you go to get the shot?” Yesterday my wife showed me a photograph made by adventurer, Jimmy Chin. Jimmy is wired to the outside of “the needle” on top of the World Trade Center. He is tied in by a number of lines and carabiners and swings out over Manhattan to get the shot. If art takes guts, photography is art and Jimmy is an artist.

The next time I hear a “bump in the night,” I’ll just assume that my wife is out getting the shot. She will be working in the spirit of Dian Arbus who said it best:
” taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.”

My wife has quite the sweet tooth.