Presence and absence in a picture

Presence of absence...

This is the ability to render a space without people or any kind of actions and yet somehow convey the sense of their being in the space—a lingering life force, as if someone has just departed or is about to arrive. Yet the power of images also arises from what they do not make present—from a type of absence they do not dispel. While it is somehow true that the world only exists through the senses, humans can recreate worlds in their minds looking into the blank space. Human imagination allows them to explore the paradox: there are no people in any of his photographs, and yet in all of them a sense of human presence can be felt. This is because I find urban spaces and objects that are often mundane an ordinary street, corner or abandoned object but which are lifted out of the everyday by a particular kind of resonance, an immanence, a sense of something still living and breathing.

“We should go into the “real world”, lift our chins, and breathe deep the wonders of the offline”(Jurgenson, 66)

Through the camera, I see not what is present, but what is missing. I see evidence of absence through the presence of what remains. I remembered my New York trip with friends during Thanksgiving was an amazing time. We were at Dumbo to see the well-known Brooklyn bridge and it was magnificent! Following the normal habit or the imbedded instinct, we took our phone out and captured the moment. All around us, people were holding their screens up to the sky to document the moment, as if capturing it on camera would somehow make the colors more vivid. Maybe it’s because cameras are with us all the time now, or maybe it’s because social media ruins everything, but somewhere along the way we’ve been conditioned to believe that taking photos is the opposite of living in the moment. That snapping a pic is like pulling blinders over your eyes and opting out of the experience.