and the possible future reflections of doing so
a photoessay by Roberto Gonzalez
Pictures are often planned and require certain preparation. Photos usually try to capture significant moments that may trigger memories and feelings: birthdays, vacations, weddings and graduations. However, I was never a big fan of these pictures where I had to pose. I found it uncomfortable, yet I understood the idea. “We have to look good in pictures, because they will be shown to an audience”. So, as a photographer, you have to think of the audience. I became a photographer at age 18, when I bought my Canon Rebel XT. Often experimenting and sometimes failing in doing so, I have always tried to find a way to take pictures in unusual ways. I use my camera as a gun, in the most surrealistic way, shooting people without notice, without premeditation, quickly/instinctually adjusting focus and zoom, giving them fake cues and capturing their fears and the antonyms of fears.
In the present, the act of sneezing may be considered insignificant. It does not have enough cultural or social value to be visually documented. People sometimes even feel embarrassed about it, because it brings out their inner self, their hidden beasts, their deformed faces and their instinctual roars. A picture of someone sneezing is a reflection of their innocence, of their true selves. And people, well, they are afraid of showing that to other people. There is a slight feeling of impotence and lack of self-control. It eliminates their self-awareness and their usual preparedness for just a slice of a second. Capturing a sneeze means capturing the essence of an instant. A sneeze is usually 47mph and may go as high as over-a-half-thousand mph.
A sneeze goes by so quickly that it is imperceptible by our lousy limited eyes. Photography, by being able to capture these instants, enhances our vision and expands our panorama, making us understand the importance and the significance of a second and its fractions. A second is a second. This concept is not as easy to digest when you look at family portraits and wedding photographs, where the importance of the shutter speed does not depend on capturing a specific moment in time but of encapsulating an idea. And that is why it is significant to capture a sneeze.
These pictures are impossible to replicate, impossible. Each one is unique, every sneeze is unique, each of a particular potency, the eyes shut in a certain way; the wrinkles form different paths, the movement of the neck and the direction of the spit will be different from sneeze to sneeze.
People usually try to look good in pictures and would naturally discard those that misrepresent their social persona. A picture of someone sneezing may not be the best way to get to know someone, but in essence, it is. There is certain beauty in a photograph of someone sneezing, a feeling of vulnerability that the camera –as an aggressive tool- imposes. And that is worth documenting. Not one person can mask their sneeze reactions with their wealth or their apparel. An intellectual can be compared with a stupid, a rich man with a homeless and a happy person with the most depressed person in the world. An employer and an employee reach the same level of… humanness.
In these pictures can be found only the most basic emotions and natural behaviors, and that opposes the original practice of photography.
In the early days of photography, taking a picture took hours, people dressed up and posed, avoiding any movement, their faces were meant to be frozen in a specific way. It was almost like a show, and the photographer was the leading showman. It was considered a bourgeois activity and it was meant to represent people’s lifestyles and their wealth. With time, picture taking become more quotidian and less of a process.
Today, most people carry a camera with them, everywhere. More themes are being explored and photos are less planned, more careless and more abstract, referencing to a specific instant in a particular time and place, instead of an idea. A sneeze can very well exemplify this purity in photographs that we are approaching, slowly losing all the preconceived ideas and traditional practices of photography and gaining a more unique and personal perception, a Kandinsky-like attitude towards photography.
A photograph of a sneeze does not carry the nostalgia monster; it cannot be linked to an ideal moment. It cannot retrace the path of pain or bring back desirable places and feelings. A photograph of a sneeze is just a photograph of a sneeze. It may not be nostalgic, but it may be depressing. It is a cold idea, a bitter feeling of discomfort, knowing that a photo can capture those irrelevant instants and make them possibly permanent. The information in these pictures is not expansive and is hard to deconstruct.
Show these apparently quotidian images to an audience and hear the silence… or some giggles. Let them know that…
…life is like that. And that photographs are to freeze time and that the clock never stops ticking, it never does, unless a snapshot it taken.
Don’t smile. Sneeze.
