Photo Essayby
ubiqueComment: Before I read the extensive verbiage already here, I'd like to make some comments fresh from your essay.
Your thesis is untenable, but all the more fun for it. Art, as you say, is transformation, and you transform the snapshot with your essay. In fact, that is what's wonderful about your essay, and not because it proved anything.
Your snapshot, for which you bent down in the grass to create effects of light, your snapshot, behind which is a story that you explain to us, a story that fills the snapshot with metaphor and meaning, is no longer a snapshot, not for us.
I think your notion of snapshots is on thin ice, and that's what makes it so vivid. Just today I was throwing rocks and sticks on thin ice. Sometimes the stick would break apart and the pieces would slide along the ice. Sometimes the rock would crack the ice but then bounce up and slide along the top. Once, the rock pierced right through into the lake. But each time a rock or stick bounced, it played the ice like a drum. A wild, seemingly artificial noise of vibration wobbled the lake.
Thin ice is where all the action is. When snapshots are more important than photographs, it's because of a delicacy, a fragility, as though that frozen moment might crack, and then... what then? What happens then to time and moments and memory?
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