This photograph halts me. I can't go anywhere, but further inside the piece. I'm transformed, and forever more, my life has changed. I'm in Central Park. It's 12/11/80. It's hard to believe that the shot wasn't staged, but if it were, it would be half as "forming." Do you feel the particular "quality of life generated by this form" when you encounter it?
I didn't get to mention "tension" in photography in my Eisner FB post. Tension here can be found in multiple "forms," but let's just look at one; capturing raw human emotion. Each of the players in the image, add to a collective, a sum, that informs me. I don't really have words for the young man's face, nor the facial expression on the older woman, and what about the half face in pain, with her angular bone structure, set between the two main subjects and placed in the top third of the image? They are teaching me about their experience, giving me a quality of life, a meaning, a coherence, a competence, only possible through the use of "form."
Is there an "imaginative bridge" for me here? Well, I would like to work with the form of "tension" in my classroom management. I wonder if my use of "silence" adds tension, as I wait for students to settle? Do my non-verbal cues add tension? Should I strum a dissonant chord every so often? Will a form of tension halt the kids, the way it stopped me in my tracks? Will it collect the kids, the way I was collected and informed?
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