Mónica Riveiro
The February 2023 issue of Frames Digital Companion features an article in the “Reading Frames” section by W. Scott Olsen of one of my photographs from the “Historias de Liquerique” project.
I am only authorized to put the title page and another page of the article since the publication is for subscribers. I have chosen the introduction because it describes very well the force of certain images that not only freeze time but also leave us waiting for what is going to happen.
The text follows with a compositional description of the image and why it works in black and white and the jumping kids are not looking at us (how would the meaning change if it was in color and they were looking at us while jumping). And as a conclusion to the article, this visual story is transferred to a literary one, treating the two boys as main and secondary characters; in addition to praising a successful image, this being the one that requests and rewards continuous observation and reading.
This is the text we can read in this page:
"Let’s begin with, and stay with, the image.
All photographs are frozen moments. Even a motion picture is a collection of frozen moments going by very fast. But there is a special type of image where the frozen moment has a nearly bursting sense of kinetic energy. It’s something apart, something more, than other images.
In these images, something has happened, something will happen soon, and there is that wonderful or terrible moment of apprehension in media res. The universe is suspended, stopped, mid-process.
Among these images, there is a special kind which catches people mid-air. This still image becomes emphatically kinetic. There is potential energy everywhere. Even though the beginning point and the ending point are known, or at least clearly implied, there is something about the arc which we find fascinating because time is frozen and made permanent, or at least more knowable. In real time, that moment is a thrill, fleeting and transitory, barely but convincingly perceived. It’s visceral but unsustainable. It’s the reason we’re there."
Frames Magazine
