CAROLINE SILBER /

EMAIL ADDRESS /

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cnsilber@gmail.com

 

 

INSTAGRAM / 

 

cnsilber

 

 

ARTIST STATEMENT / 

 

The first time I took a photograph I was in third grade. I had a borrowed camera and little idea how to use it. Standing in front of my school, fiddling with the device, I looked up to see a limousine coming down the street. As it glided past, I had the presence of mind to raise my camera, point the lens, and press the shutter release. The resulting image – long, sleek car; slight horizontal blur conveying smooth motion; cropped to draw attention to the mysterious, tinted windows and leave to the imagination the full length of the vehicle – found its way into a frame on my teacher’s desk.

 

Henri Cartier-Bresson spoke of “the decisive moment” – the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression.” Although I wouldn’t recognize it for many years, shooting that limo, at precisely that instant, was a decisive moment in what I now think of as my photography career.

 

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The number of photographs uploaded to social media every day is greater than the total number of pictures taken from the invention of photography in the 1800s until the dawn of the 21st century. Everyone has a phone, every phone has a camera, and more people are taking, sharing, and enjoying photographs than ever before. Our current era may be a Golden Age for photography. But is it a Golden Age for photographers?

 

“No one,” says Peter Turnley, the photojournalist who has been a mentor to me, “will ever again have a career like mine.” Meaning, the economics of publishing no longer support it. In the 1980s and 1990s, Turnley shot hundreds of Newsweek magazine covers. Armed with a Nikon, a suitcase, and a Newsweek corporate credit card, every week, wherever in the world the story was, Turnley flew there, in the process capturing many of the iconic images of those times: An emaciated Ethiopian child. Yeltsin standing defiantly on the tank. An inconsolable Armenian father, post-earthquake, hurling himself onto his son’s tiny coffin. Countless refugees fleeing endless conflicts.

 

Photos today feel ubiquitous and disposable but images remain as potent as ever. For confirmation look no further than the recent photograph of the Syrian boy face down on a Turkish beach, a photo seen around the world within minutes of its publication – a photo that triggered a policy shift by the most powerful governments on earth to boost the number of refugees they will accept. In our age of oversharing and overload, a single still image exudes a silent strength. It gets your attention without shouting. Film and video dictate how long you’re supposed to watch. But how much time you choose to stare at a photo – that’s a flexible contract between you and that image. Photographs wordlessly convey truth and not only make us see but also make us feel and act.

 

Photography matters.

 

What I see through my viewfinder matters. The subject, the composition, the light, the depth-of-field, and a dozen other choices overt or unconscious: all matter. I walk streets unfamiliar in search of stories at once fully recognizable and freshly told. I am drawn to street photography over studio setups because it is real and unpredictable. My instinct tells me where to go, when to wait patiently. The moments I capture thrill me in part precisely because of their random, capricious nature. I may see nothing or I may stumble on something only I am there to witness, a proverbial tree falling in a forest, and because I am there to capture it, it makes a sound. You know of that tree because I was there as it toppled over.

 

I may fret about the future of the photo industry or try in vain to imagine the contours of my career – but in the end, such worry is pointless. My job is, simply, in a fraction of a second, to recognize and capture the decisive moment, so you and a handful or a hundred or a billion like you may see what I saw in that infinitesimal flicker of time. I squeeze the shutter release. And that is all that matters.