The Indecisive Moment: Street Photography & AI
<p><em>I realized I wanted to photograph time. You can’t see time, and you can’t touch it. That’s why it’s the furthest thing from our five senses. But with photography, I can capture time.</em><br />
— Miyako Ishiuchi, <em>What Photographers Go Up Against 6: Time</em></p>
<p>I’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 — an extension of my arm. My Precious is, of course, my camera.</p>
<p>Years ago I wrote about the <a href="https://jillcorral.medium.com/everything-is-amazing-766af5442fd2" rel="noopener">“Zen” of street photography</a>, by which I meant its meditative nature for me — how its practice enlivened my senses to the world around me, made me walk more slowly and observantly — excruciatingly (and often exhaustingly) mindful of the world around me. I wrote somewhere once that of every street photo I take — no matter how long ago, no matter how many 1000s of photos I’ve taken — 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>“<strong>The decisive moment</strong>” 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[…] Photography must seize upon this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it. […] 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 />
— </em>Henri Cartier-Bresson, <em>The Decisive Moment</em></p>
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