The Moment

Introduction

The Moment An Encounter with Passers-by on the Street

Individual Work 2020 Summer, Chongqing

Content

“Oop! The Moment on the streets! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.”

“Street photography is not documentary, but intuition, a Poetic Experience.”

“To me, photography is the Simultaneous Recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a Precise Organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Street Photographer

“Montage is an editing technique in which a series of short shots are sequenced to condense space, time, and information, which is always a literary, musical, or artistic composite of juxtaposed more or less heterogeneous elements.”

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

[1] From Continuous Spacetime to Instaneous Spacetime - Deconstruct Pedestrians’ Perception of Existence

In early June, when people finally came back to normal life after the pandemic quarantine, I got a good chance to record people’s public life after quarantine in Chongqing. When I used my camera to record what was happening and capture moments on the street as a absolute observer, I had a completely different feeling from what I had felt before. When I saw the smile of that little girl, I made a direct view connection with her at that moment and I finally figured out what was the situation.

People keep crossing bidirectionally on the sidewalks every day. In this continuous process, most people do not have a persistant focus of this physical environment, and they usually observe the streets in a moving frame of reference, which finally leads to few memory and a vague feeling about the street space and related pedestrians. To be more specific, most of time, in the continuous and moving spactime on the streets, these pedestrians are not able to perceive the existence of any other individuals, let alone further communication.

Different from normal pedestrians on the streets, street photographers always would like to observe the street space “in a fraction of a second”. The observation of moments on the streets provide them an absolute viewpoint to understand the spacetime and the world. Compared with walking people, it is always much easier for a street photographer to have a strong feeling of surrounding environment including people.

Observing the world in a continous or instaneous perspective will bring pedestrians different feelings and recognition of the street space and other people there. Creating more moments on the street is a good way not only to reconstruct individuals’ feelings about public space like streets, but also to bring more public communication and benefits.

[2] Montage of Moments - Reconstruct Pedestrians’ Experience through Narranology

This project explores to build a process on the streets, which could reconstruct pedestrians’ experience and make them transfer from a continuous perspective to a instaneous one, creating moments, connecting strangers together and constructing a good public space.

Montage, the filmmaking technique, is used in this project as an important method to sequence the moments and build a poetic experience for pedestrians. Three phases are designed for a narrative experience: Capture, Focus and The Moment, which lead pedestrians to construct view relations with other people walking in the same direction or in the opposite direction on the other side of the device. Many other public functions like street landscape, shops and small paths could also fit into the device prototype quite well, building a complete public space.