If “all social reality is staged,” according to T.R. Young, then what is the relation of that point of view to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s that photography captures a decisive moment? It’s as if a street photographer is just an audience member of Hamlet snapping photos. She knows what will already happen.
Yerevan, 2023 by author
Before we meet our “betters,” we carry out the hundreds of little activities that make up getting ready for the world: shower, shave, caffeine to stay alert and chipper. We are constructing our “best foot forward,” although I’m not sure why one would be better than another. Perhaps, you linguists out there reading this, would inform me, if you please?
But then, doesn’t the street photographer do the same thing? Play a role in a play that’s already been written? If so, then a street photograph is just a still from a movie, and not something revelatory as it was before the ubiquity of photos.
Bukowski lamented this in the publishing industry in a poem where he wrote, “Who is to survive out of all this mulch? We will all be catalogued and filed.” And thus be lost somewhere in that index of authors.
“A picture held us captive,” wrote Wittgenstein. Actually, it was billions of photos on social media. 2012 was the year teenage suicides started to sky rocket along with social media growth. The social media companies, of course, deny their complicity in all this. The Gaze demanded a certain look from everyone, and that pressure, for some, on top of all the trouble in the world proved too much.