“Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Television is a stream of underselected images, each of which cancels its predecessor. Each still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.” Susan Sontag said this in her 1973 book On Photography, which has become a classic look at the phenomenon of photography.
The discussion Sontag has with the reader about photography is relative to the discussion certain fields of professional photography are contemplating presently. In photojournalism, and its present rush to fill the web with “content”, photographers are morphing into videographers as if the transition were as evolutionary as a poet into a novelist.
This photograph isn’t the best illustration of the late Ms. Sontag’s quote. It’s representative of a fleeting subconscious thought that surfaced when I saw some moment or scene and said to myself, “I need to put this onto film so I can stare at it for a while.” It may not even be interesting. For me, as I’ve said in the past, these moments are those when I think, “If I were a painter, this is what I would paint.”