Field notes · Portrait
Saturday in Slow Motion
An old living room, a leather armchair and a portrait session shaped by the unhurried pace of a Saturday.
We planned an hour and stayed until the light moved off the bay windows. The armchair belongs to her grandfather and has not been moved since the seventies, which is the only reason the room still looks like this.
The brief was a family portrait. What we made is a portrait of a room with a family in it, which turned out to be what they wanted and could not describe.
Letting the room set the pace
The family drifted in and out; I photographed whoever sat down. The grandfather read; the sisters argued about a video on a phone and then laughed at it; the dog changed chairs four times. I shot two rolls and kept eleven frames, most of them from the last twenty minutes when the sun had gone soft and everyone had stopped noticing the camera.
A room that has not changed in fifty years photographs like a person: it has a posture, and it has patience.
The objects
Every surface in that room is a shelf. Books nobody has opened since the last move, a camera that still works, a bowl of keys to doors that no longer exist. I photographed the objects the way I photographed the people, at the same distance, in the same light, so that the album does not decide which matters more.
It is the slowest session I have shot this year and the one I think about most. Nothing was directed. The room did it.
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