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IT'S CARAVAGGIO'S FAULT or TIME (WHY I COMPRESSED A THOUSAND PHOTOGRAPHS INTO A SINGLE MOMENT)
This book began with a single photograph taken over a typical Tuscan lunch in Pistoia, Italy, one January afternoon. Like most people, I owned a camera, and as a filmmaker, I had more than a passing interest in photography. I liked the immediacy of photographs, but they also left too much out. What my eyes saw was always grander than any lens could capture. Its deficiency mainly had to do with the concept of time. Films were stories based on sequences of events—an arc, with beginning, middle, and end set tumbling through time; photographs were frozen instants, capturing no more than what could be seen in the blink of an eye. How could I introduce the presence of time, of an emerging and evolving story comprised of not one, but many moments, into a single photograph?
During the years Ombretta and I were together in Italy, her family made me the designated photographer of every celebration or shared event, so they were used to seeing a camera in my hands. But when we gathered on this particular day, I didn't take one or two pictures...I took nearly a thousand. The more I photographed, the less they seemed to notice. It was as if my camera became invisible. Afterwards I studied dozens of images of Ombretta's mother and father, of their children and grandchildren, all collected around that dinner table. I compared gestures and expressions, searching for the precise moment that defined who each of them were, not only alone, but in relationship to one another. It was a giant puzzle, one that when finally assembled became a single snapshot of an entire afternoon spent together. It essentially collapsed time into what appeared to be a single moment—but one that never actually happened.
This book began with a single photograph taken over a typical Tuscan lunch in Pistoia, Italy, one January afternoon. Like most people, I owned a camera, and as a filmmaker, I had more than a passing interest in photography. I liked the immediacy of photographs, but they also left too much out. What my eyes saw was always grander than any lens could capture. Its deficiency mainly had to do with the concept of time. Films were stories based on sequences of events—an arc, with beginning, middle, and end set tumbling through time; photographs were frozen instants, capturing no more than what could be seen in the blink of an eye. How could I introduce the presence of time, of an emerging and evolving story comprised of not one, but many moments, into a single photograph?
During the years Ombretta and I were together in Italy, her family made me the designated photographer of every celebration or shared event, so they were used to seeing a camera in my hands. But when we gathered on this particular day, I didn't take one or two pictures...I took nearly a thousand. The more I photographed, the less they seemed to notice. It was as if my camera became invisible. Afterwards I studied dozens of images of Ombretta's mother and father, of their children and grandchildren, all collected around that dinner table. I compared gestures and expressions, searching for the precise moment that defined who each of them were, not only alone, but in relationship to one another. It was a giant puzzle, one that when finally assembled became a single snapshot of an entire afternoon spent together. It essentially collapsed time into what appeared to be a single moment—but one that never actually happened.