not about brazil

I remember the image somewhat vividly. Like all memories, it is hazy and fragmented, but that was also the nature of the photograph. I’m not sure what on that day compelled me to open that one book amongst the others, having already spent hours outside the darkroom mesmerized in the works of Sebastão Salgado and other documentary artists. Perhaps I felt the urge to glimpse something different. Perhaps my photography teacher suggested it to me.

By now, I can’t recall the name of the artist or the title of the image. What I do remember is the method it used and the feeling it stimulated. The photograph was a typical glimpse into the car of a train: two rows of benches, one with three seats, one with two, where the photographer sits with the shutter focused. To his eleven o’clock, a man reads a book. In the seat behind the photographer, to his direct left, sits a woman with her cat. Outside the window is an array of tress. The image, the whole, is fragments. Elements of the wider picture fall together, imperfectly. The artist shot each individual image at a different shutter speed. Some are blurred, others are sharp; every shot has the date at the lower right hand corner. The lower half of the image of the man reading a book is still, the bench and area he sits at, still. His head, moving every so slightly as he turns a page and scans the text, is captured over a longer frame, a blur to the viewer. The multiple photographs fall uneasily over one another, overlapping one another. Some of the trees appear sharp and focused as the train passes by, others, a haze of springtime green. You can't understand the whole without looking at each photograph. Each photograph is irrelevant on its own. But it works.

My photography teacher told me that he began to see the world in black and white as his eye adjusted. Colors would vanish into grey, and that would transform into contrasts. Perhaps, I thought, my eye can do the same for shutter speed. Along the Hudson River from Poughkeepsie I grasp a sense of it. I don’t get the chance to travel by train too often. The winter makes it easier, simpler to focus; the distractions are less, both inside and outside the train car. Lines in the ice remain upon the river’s surface from a cargo ship, my view as I glance out the window on the other side of the train. To my ten o'clock in the three seat row a woman in a red dress reads Kafka on the Shore. In my lens of vision there are no cats, no spring trees to pass by, no vivid leaves to notice. Eventually, the eye sees the woman's hand turning the page as a blur, the cargo ship as still, the man walking by as frozen in space.