I’m not the quickest photographer - which is the kind of problem that will put a spanner in any plans for street photography (in addition to pangs about speaking to strangers on the street).
Every now and again, however, I notice structural and compositional elements that seem (at least in part) to be there. Sometimes (as with the picture below) the process of noticing these elements comes only in retrospect once it is time to bring the raw (sic) picture “back” to what I had in my mind’s eye when I captured the scene.
This can, on occasion, be considerable, and is often the point at which it is best to combine an image with a word or phrase that sums up what was going through my mind at the time. The creative process, seen from above, is thus an image, which elicits a phrase or connection, and which (with the camera ready) can be captured spontaneously and refined in processing at a later timepoint. Overall, this is a work flow well-suited to digital photography, as opposed to analogue: at least a part of the creativity resulting in the final image comes not at the time of taking the picture, or as a reaction to something that was carefully composed and visible mentally prior to an image or series of images being captured, but rather during the time afterwards, with the image working its way through the subconscious and conscious machinery to its final state.
A “decisive moment” thus turns into a short story - from the initial snapshot to the final vision. As in “The French Kiss,” below.
Frankfurt 2018 : 177/365