Elyse Lightman Essay

Elyse Lightman
April 25, 2003
Reflections on the judging:

Tell us, we ask. Please, from your heart. Show us your world, this space of the world that has become your breath, your eyesight. We ask to be stolen from our present place- we ask to be lifted and thrown. Take us beneath the veil. Enrage us into action.

In Blindness, by Jose Saramago, a man stops his car in the midst of a traffic jam, confused, murmuring, nonsensical- he has suddenly and inexplicably become blind. When reading this, I think to myself how every morning I open my eyes and see the sunlight coming through the coral-colored fabric over my windows, shining orange and pink across the walls, the floorboards.

During the two days of judging for the International Fund for Documentary Photography Competition, the judges and the assistants together formed a community of deep looking. I learned that “seeing” is a gift we are given at birth, but a power that needs to be cultivated- on both ends of the spectrum. Many photographers can capture a moment for us, but only a rare few are capable of hitting us with a particularly force.

The best photographers, I found, create a world for us, in this case through twenty arresting scenes. During the Renaissance, painters strove to follow the ideal of Varieta- variety in their works. The idea was that they were imitating the creator’s original gift of diversity on earth- in plants, animals, types of flowers, fruits. This highest good was worthy of imitation on day one of existence, again five hundred years ago, and today: as humans we thrive on diversity, and we are drawn to it. The best photographers know this virtue.

These photographers feel their subject and their mission so powerfully that we are bathed in it; we cannot help but be submerged. This is your world, they tell us. Follow me here. They get inside the minds of their subjects and they articulate what it means to be there. They show us the details, the unusual, even when we think we have seen it before. They wear the goats’ sacrificial blood across their chest; they hold a camera towards the dead in the street; they return to the same neighborhood of New York City every day for thirty years because this corner of the world pulls at them, at their very inner-stitchings.

At the end of my two days of assisting the judging, I felt exhausted. My mind felt full beyond capacity; I was super-saturated; I was left without words. I was a canvas filled with the brilliant turquoise of a stairwell in Argentina, the slashed skin of Shia Muslims in the UK, the hands of Orthodox Russians in prayer at the dinner table, two women kissing through the glass of a prison window, the contrasting blue and yellow of veils in Afghanistan.

At the same time, however, I felt awake, to an extent that I have rarely felt in my lifetime. I felt shifted, not only as a photographer and as a writer, but as a human being. I felt I had been shown a truth. I had heard middle C. I had seen the power of photography, of images, to show beauty and suffering, to inspire and connect with its viewer. I felt a great sense of unification. I felt connected to the world. We are all one people- quotes Fred Ritchin in his writing on Salgado in An Uncertain Grace, sitting on my bookshelf in my bedroom. We are all probably one man.

« back