The Indecisive Moment: Street Photography & AI

<p><em>I realized I wanted to photograph time. You can&rsquo;t see time, and you can&rsquo;t touch it. That&rsquo;s why it&rsquo;s the furthest thing from our five senses. But with photography, I can capture time.</em><br /> &mdash; Miyako Ishiuchi,&nbsp;<em>What Photographers Go Up Against 6: Time</em></p> <p>I&rsquo;ve spent countless hours walking streets both near and far from home with My Precious in my hand and a muscle-memory for it in my fingers that made it effectively part of me &mdash; an extension of my arm. My Precious is, of course, my camera.</p> <p>Years ago I wrote about the&nbsp;<a href="https://jillcorral.medium.com/everything-is-amazing-766af5442fd2" rel="noopener">&ldquo;Zen&rdquo; of street photography</a>, by which I meant its meditative nature for me &mdash; how its practice enlivened my senses to the world around me, made me walk more slowly and observantly &mdash; excruciatingly (and often exhaustingly) mindful of the world around me. I wrote somewhere once that of every street photo I take &mdash; no matter how long ago, no matter how many 1000s of photos I&rsquo;ve taken &mdash; I remember exactly where I was standing and what the scene sounded like around me. A synaesthetic frisson generated by a sea of sensory data in the depths of my physiology.</p> <p>&ldquo;<strong>The decisive moment</strong>&rdquo; is a phrase often used to describe the essence of street photography as a practice and genre, coming from a canon work by Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1952:</p> <p><em>Photography implies the recognition of a rhythm in the world of real things. What the eye does is to find and focus on the particular subject within the mass of reality; what the camera does is simply to register upon film the decision made by the eye[&hellip;] Photography must seize upon this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it. [&hellip;] Photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.<br /> &mdash;&nbsp;</em>Henri Cartier-Bresson,&nbsp;<em>The Decisive Moment</em></p> <p><a href="https://jillcorral.medium.com/the-indecisive-moment-street-photography-ai-47e4f64611b1"><strong>Visit Now</strong></a></p>
Tags: Photography AI