marchersby
2mccsComment by ubique: This is my top pick, so let̢۪s get that out of the way first: it̢۪s the cursed Order of the Blue Thumb for you, plus a 10.
WTF?
Why my top pick? It̢۪s a negligent photograph as far as conventional craftsmanship goes. Blurry, indistinct, distant, and taken after the marchers have passed so we don̢۪t even know who or what they are. That̢۪s enough to warrant curt dismissal of the picture by many viewers and especially (alas) by most photographers who are disadvantaged by their very fixed, and limiting, idea of what makes a good photograph.
Exquisite Negligence
But the negligence in this photograph is not only deliberate; it’s also beautifully judged, both in conception and execution. Negligent, low-fidelity photographs are fairly easy to do badly (see some of my own crap), and exquisitely difficult to do well. And this one is done far better than ‘well’. It’s quite sublime.
Transcendental
This photograph is not itself a parade of course, but nor is it merely a picture of a parade. It̢۪s neither, and yet it̢۪s both, and more. It̢۪s an elegy to both the parade (and all it stands for as a human celebration) and the meaning of a photograph (and all that stands for as a human icon). Not the actual thing, nor a particularly satisfying record of the thing, and yet it addresses and transcends both.
Documentary v Recollection
Here’s the difference. Obviously this is not the kind of parade picture you’d expect to see in next day’s local newspaper. What it is is the picture you see in your memory, long after the event. It doesn’t depict the parade; it depicts the feeling and the memory of watching a parade go by. So it’s really a recollection â€Â¦ of parades and celebrations, of small town life, of certain indelible prosaic markers in your own history (the period car, the ordinary people with names no longer recalled, even the self-important small dog present at every local event). It captures and recalls some of the fragments that shape memory, and the uncertainty of memory too.
A picture can’t do these things – can’t transport every viewer to a different place and a different personal moment – if it is explicit. Thus this is a wonderfully apt use of a carefully judged absence of fidelity. It would be diminished, and rendered unconvincing, if it were a conventional high-fidelity documentary photograph. The photograph would no longer have that rare quality that distinguishes it – the ability to be equally relevant and evocative to every viewer, pretty much regardless of personal history and experience.
Skill Disguised
You have also sneaked in some clever technical skill, behind your mask of apparent negligence. One in particular is the composition, which makes beautiful use via perspective of leading lines that pass obliquely through the picture into nothing, just as do the marchers themselves.
Whatever Next?
On an intellectual level the picture is ripe with allegory, where the marchers represent the march of human life itself, and of civilisations with their brief shining moment in the sun, banners waving and drums beating, and then their inevitable passing.
Enough
But now I go too far with this fanciful allegory stuff! Enough is to recognize and appreciate the difference between a parade, a picture of a parade, and an
object that celebrates the meaning of both. And that̢۪s what this is. Thank you.
Photographer found comment helpful.
