Carnival
Carnival…what does the word conjure up? Nighttime. Bright lights. Exotic people. Games of chance. A place. A time. A memory. An air of excitement arriving with a festival, a season, maybe simply a respite from the summer days’ heat. The rides and booths rise up in fairgrounds, parking lots, and streets, staffed by people whose stories we only imagine we know. And what an imagination we have! We run a little wild, doing things we might normally not allow ourselves. We go on rides that terrify us. We play deceptively easy games that we secretly suspect we have little chance of beating. We are there with family, with friends, with lovers. Occasionally we win.
My memories of carnivals from when I was a child are hazy, chaotic, and vibrant. In those spaces, binds loose and social mores become a bit unmoored. We are given license to push boundaries, to be someone brave and new, to get a little crazy. It’s exhilarating, maybe partly because we know it’s ephemeral. The rides and the booths and the people will move on, set up in another town, take their magic with them and return us to our routines. There we’ll be safely anchored again. But the Carnival will return…and so will we.
In these images, the use of an on-camera flash and a long shutter speed captures two images, one celebrating the fluid nature of time and one interrupting the continuum. In the former, normally static objects morph into unpredictable abstract forms while in the latter the architecture of the scene is established, expressions and gestures are snatched from the flow, and reality reconstitutes. The two battle against one another creating a visual tension that mirrors the energy and dissonance of the original scene.
My memories of carnivals from when I was a child are hazy, chaotic, and vibrant. In those spaces, binds loose and social mores become a bit unmoored. We are given license to push boundaries, to be someone brave and new, to get a little crazy. It’s exhilarating, maybe partly because we know it’s ephemeral. The rides and the booths and the people will move on, set up in another town, take their magic with them and return us to our routines. There we’ll be safely anchored again. But the Carnival will return…and so will we.
In these images, the use of an on-camera flash and a long shutter speed captures two images, one celebrating the fluid nature of time and one interrupting the continuum. In the former, normally static objects morph into unpredictable abstract forms while in the latter the architecture of the scene is established, expressions and gestures are snatched from the flow, and reality reconstitutes. The two battle against one another creating a visual tension that mirrors the energy and dissonance of the original scene.