黃佳淳
Gaps in Photography, 2019
“Memory encompasses neither the entire spatial appearance of a state of affairs nor its entire temporal course. Compared to photography, memory’s records are full of gaps... No matter which scenes an individual remembers, they all mean something relevant to that person, though he or she might not necessarily know what they mean. An individual retains memories because they are personally significant.”
--Siegfried Kracauer
Response to the text:
Perhaps all records are full of gaps, even photography. Photography in essence, are pixels recorded on the digital censor, back then they call it grain on the film. If you see it that way in a microscopic level it is also full of gaps. We have enough pixels for higher resolutions doesn’t indicate that it is continuous with no gaps. In addition, there are also gaps from the subjectivity of the photographer. The decision of the framing (making composition) is the key: what to leave out, what to let in, and how to arrange those that are let in. There is also the decision of the exposure, of deciding how much and where to let the light in. Light defines space. These are all gaps in photography. These decisions are sometimes made without the awareness of them. It might be the unfamiliarity with the technical aspect of the camera, and perhaps, from how much we trust photography to be “objective.” Our assumption of photography to be “objective” made me rethink about the gaps, the gaps in different scales. (the gaps in memory and the gaps in photography are of different scales) Perhaps all these gaps in different scales are not all that different. Perhaps it is all these gaps and things in between gaps that makes the individual experience significantly specific; it is the specifically significant experience that all beings share collectively.