Love Me. Love my Umbrella.
James Joyce.
I’m standing there in Golden Gate Park with my Leica and two dancers decide to play with gravity under an umbrella built when the last century was still drawing breath, and what am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do when two bodies make architecture out of air and Ive got maybe three seconds before the whole thing dissolves into what it was before: just people, just rain, just another Friday getting swallowed by the fog?
The viewfinder. It’s not a window. It’s a trap door. I look through it and suddenly I’m not the one doing the looking, it’s looking at me, demanding something, asking questions I didn’t know I was supposed to answer. The camera doesn’t give a shit about my intentions. It just sits there, this cold gorgoeus mechanical witness, waiting to see if I’m brave enough or stupid enough or desperate enough to let the moment possess me instead of the other way around.
Because here’s what I figured out, what, I think, every photographer who’s worth a damn eventually figures out: Photography is a reflection that comes to life in action and leads to a form of meditation. I see it first, that suspended moment, but it sees me back. Spontaneity intervenes right there in the viewfinder, that fragile instant where everything could collapse or crystallize, and what precedes it is reflection on the subject, what follows is a meditation on finality. And it’s in that exalting, trembling space between a before and an after that the real photographic work happens, the sequencing of images, the syntax of light and shadow and two people dancing under an umbrella who didn’t ask to become permanent.
This requires a writer’s spirit. Has to. Because isn’t photography just writing with light? Except, and here’s where it gets mean, where it gets true, while the writer possesses his words, the photographer is himself possessed by his photos. Possessed by the limit of the real, which he must transcend or become its prisoner.
And that’s the bargain, right? That’s the whole sick, beautiful bargain. These images of Babatunji and Yujin Kim doing their umbrella dance, they’re not about dance. They’re about that millisecond when the world forgets to be the world and becomes something else. Something that demands you look at it, that won’t let you turn away even though you know, I know, it’s already gone by the time the shutter clicks.
Love me, love my umbrella. Joyce knew. The umbrella’s not protection. It’s complicity. It’s saying: yes, I see you, I’m willing to stand under this absurd canopy with you while everything else pretends to make sense. And I was there with my camera, getting possessed, getting written on, letting the light do what light does when I shut up long enough to let it speak.