What Light and Shadow Leave Behind

As you might guess, the children were perfect subjects just as they were, their performance for the camera couldn't have been more natural, and the light just before sunset wrapped around us perfectly.

The kids who suddenly appeared in front of my camera were more natural than anything I could have directed. They smiled without being asked to smile, and stopped in front of the wall without being asked to stand there. All I had to do was focus on pressing the shutter, so the moment wouldn't slip by too fast.

Light gets there before the person choosing the scene. The lower the sun sank, the bluer the wall looked, and the children's faces still held the brightness of a day that hadn't quite gone. Standing in the middle of it, I found myself thinking less about what I was shooting than about why I had stopped in front of this scene.

Feeling like some hotshot photographer, I wanted to grin from ear to ear at these angels who had dropped in on me and brag, “Pretty good shot, huh?” But the thought that came first was a little strange. A good photograph is less something I make than something I'm allowed, briefly, to have.

On catching a moment

When you make documentaries, most of your time goes to waiting. Waiting until someone's way of talking becomes familiar, until you can see the rhythm of a place, until everyone forgets for a while that the camera is there. Photography turned out to be much the same.

Good scenes often came at the tail end of ordinary time, more than in the openings I worked hard to create. The moment the person holding the camera relaxes a little. The moment the person being photographed stops being aware of themselves. The moment light and shadow each find their place.

Sometimes a photograph feels less like keeping what I saw and more like taking dictation from a stretch of time I never fully understood.

What lingers

These pictures stay with me, and I doubt it's only because they came out well. The light that day, the children's laughter, the pride I felt and the slight embarrassment that came with it: all of that is stuck to them. A frame holds the subject, and it also holds the attitude of the person taking the picture.

So whenever I look at this scene, I get a little more careful. Before I say the light was good, before I say the kids were lovely, I remember first that the moment came to me, briefly, of its own accord.

In the end, what light and shadow leave behind asks me less about the pictures I took than about who I was in front of them, and it keeps asking for a long time.