“Lost time is never found again.” — Benjamin Franklin
I am celebrating a recent photo shoot, a high school graduation of sorts. My client, Jessie Kleitz, wanted to mark the end of her high school education as so many before her have done. But we live in a time of a novel coronavirus and a quarantine that has all but stopped ordinary life. Graduation ceremonies and photographic renderings of the occasions have been postponed or abandoned. Even so, Jessie wanted a record of the moment. She painted a string of baby blue forget-me-nots around the edges of her cap and slipped on the black robe that proclaims success. So off we went to find a location that would speak to her big moment as she crossed the threshold to her future.
Photographers sometimes speak of photographs as “captures.” They say that photographers capture light, preserving the three-dimensional world in a two-dimensional artifact. They say photographs preserve time the way amber preserves ancient dragonflies. Yet that is an illusion. Photographers use light to create something new, a representation of the interaction between themselves and their subjects. Photographers use light to etch an image that lives in the present whenever viewers imbue it with meaning or simply glance at it and scroll past.
When I photographed Jessie I saw a young woman of great promise embarking into an unsteady world. A few weeks ago, George Floyd, a black man, died while in the custody of the Minneapolis police, pinned to the ground by a white, veteran officer for nearly nine minutes despite Floyd’s desperate pleas that he could not breathe. Since then, riots and looting and protests have raged worldwide. Against that background, here before me was a young woman with stunning blue eyes, rich red hair and skin like a French bisque doll who must make sense of it all and find her place in the smoldering aftermath.
What would my images record? What would she see in them 50 years hence, if she stumbles across them in a drawer? What will I see of myself when I process these photos as I edge away from my forty years as a newspaper journalist and step toward the future as a photographer?
Photographs are like kaleidoscopes. You never see the same image twice. That’s because photographs record an illusion of time, measured in fractions of a second. They allow us to see what we remember of time, but always through our own lenses, which themselves are constantly changing.
I watched a video today of Prof. Robert Hudson, one of my jujutsu instructors, explaining a proper “natural stance" (shizen tai in Japanese). It’s a static position, standing on both feet with the spine erect in a plumb line, perched over a spot just behind the ball of the foot, a point known in acupuncture as kidney one. As you stand in this position you realize that you are never perfectly stationary. You waver ever so slightly as the muscles and nervous system adjust to the constantly rotating earth and your own reaction to gravity. This, I thought, is like releasing the shutter. It merely appears to freeze time.
Congratulations, Jessie, on your accomplishment and best wishes on your future. Thank you for for bringing me out of quarantine, and for helping to teach me about time and the speed of light.
