tHe sHaDoW aND tHe sPiDeR
For those who haven't seen these, you are in for a treat - a sample of Ant's special eye...
This appears as if it was shot on a movie set. Kind of ruins it for me, in terms of street cred...
This is my most treasured photograph, I took it on my son's birthday. The night before, I was in his room and having a conversation along the lines of ...you can do anything you dream.
It had to be about a dream because he cannot leave his room and has to stay there and in the dark. Any stray light, even the catchlight of a bright reflection off my glasses ...or the slightest breeze like a soft breath against my cheek, and he will be sent into the most miserable pain in the existence of anyone living. It isn't that he even needs to think about the pain as some might think about an ache in a neck, or a back or a leg, or a heart. instead it is in a place that begins even before you can give it a thought. He is my child that has grown without me being able to think about how much he has grown, into a man that has never left his room.
The pain can last for days, but I forget, my pain is much longer and is just a memory now because his pain is lasting more than the year. He is so brilliant, a brilliant mind and so innocent that he still thinks the world is beautiful, and so tall and a proof that I am not so small. He is blonde and blue like someone in my dreams. He is everything I ever wanted. I can hear him in his room, I heard him just now, his room is behind that wall just there, right there behind my monitor. He is in trouble and is in my mind like the ugly thing in his, and it destroys me and leaves nothing of me for my own, except my photograph.
He turned his light off, that is what I heard, its 11:23am which has a funny relevance to this photo, it just happened then, I took it at :23 ...have a look, (lol). That is the only way he can get away from his creature, to laugh at silly things that are not so silly at all, but he is finding that difficult too, I am afraid that the next thing we will do to him will be to sedate him, the anti-depressants do that, they make him dozey in a head that makes him forget how to use the door when he goes to the bathroom and maybe next we will arrange it so that he never leaves his room. At least he has that now, he can go to the bathroom and sometimes I see him from my chair as he walks like a ghost between his room and the next. Everyone complains at why I have put my desk here, Lyn wants to redecorate me ...move me to another part but I can see perfectly from here while I make my photographs.
He can't come out to look, he is two meters away from my arms and my fingers that pound the keys. The light is too bright and we are in a house that is already dark, the windows are closed and covered, and not a stray puff of wind or even a bright LED on an appliance anywhere.
That he turned his light off and I took this photo at the same minutes is why these little photographs can be so precious to us without anyone ever knowing what they really are about and that its meaning keeps growing like a plant that never flowers. These photographs are about ourselves and this is something totally unique to street photography, it does not exist in any other genre. Oh yes they think the photograph has their likeness but in Street Photography ...its you, it is absolutely you and not a likeness at all. I cannot believe that in the entire history of Street Photography no one has ever been able to tell you this, you have been told it a hundred times but you never understood what it means.
I was rushing home to Jake's birthday party, a private little affair of fairy bread and sweets because he has no friends. This thing that was said between us, is in this photograph, it is a message and something that we talked about, and we laughed.
I smile when I look at this photograph. I only have one photograph of Jake, I took it in the dark and afterward I had to slide the exposure slider and the brightness all the way to the right until I could just barely see. It is the worst photograph that I have ever taken, and I can never say it is my favourite because it is my only one of him. Instead I have to say it is this one instead.
ant
