Life is very complicated. In every person’s life, s/he has to juggle dozens of different things competing for attention. Although the lives of most people would make pretty boring movies, there certainly is drama. In fact, most good movies use situations like disasters and monsters to highlight the drama that regular people face every day. When I think of photography as an art form, I think of the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words.” A photograph, or a still, is an attempt to take a scene form real life, and capture it one, still image. For example, this picture of Santonio Holmes catching the game-winning catch of Super Bowl XLIII captures all the drama of the back and forth of a close Super Bowl fourth quarter, in a single frame.
Santonio Holmes game-winning catch http://www.pitt.edu/~tas143/catch.jpg
With this in mind, there were a few different collections in the International Center of Photography that were really tremendous. One was Gideon Mendel’s collection of pictures from a waterlogged village in India. Each of the images capture’s the struggle of the regular, ordinary people to keep going even though they live in several feet of water. Another was Sohei Nishino’s Jerusalem Panorama Map, which showed the wide spectrum of different people in one of the world’s most controversial cities. But by far the collection that showcased simple humanity more than any other were the Ponte City light boxes by Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse. These three light boxes show images from the fifty-four-story Ponte City building in Johannesburg. The images from show the TV sets, doors, and windows from each apartment. The picture were then organized by floor and apartment number into these three towering light boxes.
ponte city
Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse
As you look at each one, the tiny images that are on every set, the people standing in some of the doors, and the view from each window, who really start to wonder about all the lives going on in those rooms. What did each of these people think as they looked out of the window? Who was watching each of these shows? What did the residents think when a man knocked on their door asking to take pictures of their homes? These questions, and the faces and lives that flash across these panels are photography at its best.
