"The Silence of the Photograph."

Before the pandemic, I made a series of photographs from the pedestrian walkway of the Manhattan Bridge, which carries four lanes of automobile traffic and four elevated subway tracks. My photos were of commuters inside the passing subway trains lost in thought. Most of the images from the series depict the quiet introspection of commuters heading home - but the actual experience of making the photographs was far different. The walkway of the Manhattan Bridge is one of the loudest places I’ve ever made photographs, and one of the few places I felt the need to put on some musician-quality ear protection to prevent hearing damage. All of that wheel-screeching noise and rumbling? Absent from the pictures. And that’s ok - the people I’m depicting are not in the midst of the noise either - they’re inside the train which is far quieter, and it’s their experience my images aim to describe.

During the pandemic, I made a series of images in my local Bay Ridge, Brooklyn park. Those pictures are also largely quiet in their portrayal of the park - trees, people enjoying the sunshine, birds, squirrels, etc. Things you’d see in urban green spaces anywhere around the city. Unlike the subway photos, which showed quiet moments (despite being made in the midst of movement and racket) the park images were, in a way, depicting a false reality by seeming to hold a silence that did not actually exist in the place shown. While my local park is a welcome space and can be a visually beautiful space, it’s not a quiet space. A six-lane highway and busy shipping lane are on one side of the park, a dense residential neighborhood is on the other side, and jet planes heading in and out of LaGuardia and JFK Airport fly overhead. There is almost always a lot of noise in the park.

But as humans, we don’t always listen for it. If the noise doesn’t represent a threat, over time we adjust and adapt until all but the most dissonant sounds fade into the background of our consciousness. Of course, the noise doesn’t actually go away, only our perceptions of it. The actual intensity of noise pollution became much more apparent when I watched a short video I made inside the park - the cacophonous soundtrack was a discordant reminder of all the sounds my silent photographs omitted.

In a sense, that meant my images were a success - I was able to create, with photographs, a separate world adjacent to the noisy everyday world most ordinary park goers experienced. By creating a photographic portal to a quiet mysterious world within the boundaries of a noisy urban world, I found a way to reach a place of magic and comfort during the most anxious early days of the pandemic.

This adaptation to sound goes in both ways. Just as our minds begin to screen out discordant persistent noise, our photos can communicate so much information and emotion that we hardly notice their silence. This is most striking to me when I consider images made by photojournalists covering conflicts such as Nick Ut’s horrific and iconic Vietnam war-era image of 10-year-old Kim Phuc and other victims running from a U.S. napalm attack on their village. Nick Ut wasn’t the only journalist witness to the attack. Other journalists photographed and even filmed the attack. In the color film footage, we hear the plane as it comes in to drop the napalm bombs, the roaring sound of the subsequent flames, and the shouts and cries from both the witnesses and the victims as they began emerging from the flames of their burned village.

It’s not the film footage we think about today despite the fact the film was in color and had sound - it’s Nick Ut’s silent image, which nevertheless screams into our consciousness with what feels like the full pain and terror of not only the moment but of war itself. But it’s not really war or the full pain and terror of the moment. It’s a black and white photograph. In that terrible instance, the silence and stillness of the image - the world reduced not reproduced - is what broke through to the hearts of so many who saw the photograph

This weekend, amidst the noise and chatter of another dangerous moment in world history, take a moment to consider the powerful silence of the images we make. How much of the world speaks us in silence? I think there is something we can use in the quiet of a still image that will help us to better understand ourselves, our world, and our time. I think if we take the time to appreciate the silent testimony of our photographs and our world, we will find at least something of what’s really important.

I’ll see you next week.

peace and love

James Prochnik The NYC Photo Community | Issue 105 | February 25 - March 4