PHOTOGRAPHS
SOMETIMES WORK on you strangely and simply: at first glance you see things
you subsequently discover are not there. Or rather, when you look again
you notice things you initially didn't realise were there. In Milt Hinton's
photograph of Ben Webster, Red Allen and Pee Wee Russell, for example,
I thought that Allen's foot was resting on the chair in front of him, that
Russell was actually drawing on his cigarette, that ...
The fact that it is not
as you remember it is one of the strengths of Hinton's photograph (or any
other for that matter), for although it depicts only a split-second the
felt duration of the picture extends several seconds either side
of that frozen moment to include - or so it seems - what has just happened
or is about to happen: Ben tilting back his hat and blowing his nose, Red
reaching over to take a cigarette from Pee Wee ...
Oil paintings leave even
the Battles of Britain or Trafalgar strangely silent. Photography, on the
other hand, can be as sensitive to sound as it is to light. Good photographs
are there to be listened to as well as looked at; the better the photograph
the more there is to hear. The best jazz photographs are those saturated
in the sound of their subject. In Carol Reiff's photo of Chet Baker on-stage
at Birdland we hear not just the sound of the musicians as they are crowded
into the small stage of the frame but the background chat and clinking
glasses of the nightclub. Similarly, in Hinton's photo we hear the sound
of Ben turning the pages of the paper, the rustle of cloth as Pee Wee crosses
his legs. Had we the means to decipher them, could we not go further still
and use photographs like this to hear what was actually being said? Or
even, since the best photos seem to extend beyond the moment they depict,
what has just been said, what is about to be said . . .
|