Nothing happened for an hour
I sat in a yard for an hour with a camera and did not press the shutter. A note on what that is for.
1 min read
In June I sat on an upturned crate in a stoneyard near Wells for an hour and eight minutes and did not take a single photograph. I had driven ninety minutes to get there. The light was good.
It is worth asking what that hour was, because it was plainly not photography and it was equally plainly not nothing. We have almost no vocabulary for it, which I think is why so few people allow themselves any.
The hour before the work
What happens in that hour is that you stop deciding. For the first twenty minutes I was still framing things: the barrow, the dust, the light on the banker. Somewhere in the second twenty I stopped, and by the last stretch I was simply watching a woman cut stone.
Uta Barth spent a career on more or less this problem, photographs of the moment before you have decided what the subject is. Her work looks like almost nothing until you have sat with it, at which point it looks like the only honest account of how seeing actually goes.
(I did take four photographs on the way back to the car, and two of them are among the best I have made, which I mention because it would be dishonest to pretend the hour was its own reward.)
The hour was not wasted and it was not preparation either. It was the part where I stopped arriving and started being there, and nothing that came afterwards would have worked without it.
