The Concepts: Connections

An earlier post about rethinking the mundane had me musing on the idea of corners: bringing things together, serving as a physical connection between different directions.  That spawned a thought process on the idea of connections: how do you capture the connection between two people?

Retiro Park; Madrid, Spain

While portraiture or posed shots tend to make for nice holiday cards and picture frames, those natural shots captured in the moment have always held more power for me. The fluidity of the relationship between the subjects is somehow frozen, almost stolen away to live eternally outside that particular moment.

However, even the standard portrait shoot can provide a chance for those quiet moments.  While collecting headshots for a friend's upcoming novel, her American Eskimo kept a close eye on us.  Getting people to hold still long enough to catch a shot is difficult enough; doing so with an animal whose capacity for reasoning and negotiation is vastly different from ours is an entirely different story.  With plenty of credit to every photographer's best friend - luck - the casual moments were more true to life than any pose could have been:  

Nando and Ashley; Pittsboro, NC

Another friend of mine recently shared his wedding album with me. While there were the requisite posed shots of the wedding party and family members, the more candid shots were by far the most powerful: the quietly contended smile of the bride as he kissed her cheek, the joy on friends' faces as they sent the happy couple off in a shower of sparklers.  Perhaps the most touching was a shot of him and his mother hugging - the pride in her face, the comfort in the way they hugged, and the sheer poetry of that quiet moment between mother and son that was utterly beautiful to witness.

Several years ago, my sister-in-law and I hatched a surprise for my brother's birthday, bringing family and friends from various corners of the country together at Wrigley Field.  The entire day was a cascade of small moments of happiness which strung themselves together into an arc of joy.  Their smiles, their expressions, the placement of her hand on his knee: this was - this forever is - them: