NEWS PHOTOGRAPHER | BOOK REVIEW

Collection spotlights photojournalist Ed Kashi’s ‘spontaneous “uncomposition”’

AM Book Cover on black.jpg

Abandoned Moments: A Love Letter to Photography
By Ed Kashi
136 pages, 42 color, 26 b/w photographs
$58. Heidelberg: Kehrer, 2021. 

By Stephen Wolgast

Taking pictures by intuition sounds mystical. How can you make photographs without thinking about composition, focus and adjusting the exposure?

Maybe after enough missteps — the back-focused portrait, an underexposed face, the wrong choice of lens — you can make the right decisions without thinking about them. Think of musicians who learn to adjust for a wrong note and a basketball player who seems to know where the ball is going before the pass is made.

Some photojournalists learn the same kind of automatic reaction. Ed Kashi is one of them.
He calls his new collection of 40 years of photography “Abandoned Moments,” a term he describes as moments “shaped by serendipity and instinct, rather than objectivity and intellect.” Released from the formality and training that direct most of the work of a creative soul, Kashi feels that with less control over his photography his images “may be more certain and more certainly true.”

In his search for truth, Kashi found himself observing life and reacting in a split second, finding serendipity and shaping it.

Look at his image of a boy watching Kashi photograph a street scene in what he describes as the poorest district of Diyarbakir, Turkey, in 1991. The street is nearly dark. With the sun practically on the horizon, it shines on only one side of the boy’s face, which we see from his cheeks up because he’s just barely in the frame.

After looking into his smiling eye, your own eyes can’t help but be drawn by the figure in the plane behind him, a figure fully clad in a coarse, brown hooded robe. It’s so voluminous that it doesn’t appear to be human, but the figure tilts forward in midstep, a cane descending from the sleeve of the right arm. Just a sliver of light falls on the figure as it walks away from the boy and toward the edge of the frame.

Then in the background, you notice a human shadow on the wall. Is it cast by the robed figure? No, the angles aren’t right, and the shadow appears to come from a child whose arms are stretched out exuberantly. Who is it? What is the connection to the others in the photograph?
The three elements show three people in three poses, and they are the only three elements lit in the scene — or in the case of the shadow, unlit on the illuminated wall — and each event takes place in a different plane.

Mystery and depth are two themes that run through Kashi’s photos in the book. Mysteries pose questions that may not have answers, while spatial depth arranges the scene, creating the question to be asked.

There’s a question on a rainy street in Beirut. Kashi’s 1996 photograph seems to have absorbed the dreary day and the gray sky, even though we see only a glimpse of the clouds. Most of the frame is nearly black. Buildings on the street cast shadows, and the sidewalk in the foreground is shaded by a marquee. Underneath it are dozens of glowing lights, as you’d find at a theater entrance, casting just enough brightness to shine through the white and pink umbrella of a man walking by. Where is he headed? Will he duck into the theater to get out of the rain?

He’s nearest to us, his red shirt catching our eye before it moves to a store whose name is in red lights behind him, and red taillights on cars driving down the street, off into the distance where the sky seems to be getting a little lighter.

Three planes, and plenty of questions.

Kashi calls these photos “imprecise glimpses of transitory events.” They stand apart from the idea of heightened action and balanced composition that typify the decisive moment.

Instead, Kashi uses what he describes as his photographic observation. It’s a method, he writes, “in which geometry, mood, emotion and possibility — the instant — united to create something new but unintended. I call this the abandoned moment.”

He found such a moment in Manambaro, Madagascar, when three rice farmers drive their cattle over a field to soften the soil before planting their crop. In the foreground and to the side is one of the farmers, shirtless, holding a switch that he will use to encourage the steers in their task. They’re moving back and forth across the middle of the frame. Behind them is another farmer with another switch, and off in the background are the mountains of the island under white clouds.

He found another abandoned moment in Damascus, Syria, as three little girls leave a mosque during Ramadan. There, in the middle plane, the youngest girl stands outside the tall doors, holding hands with the next oldest girl who, like the last of the trio, has one foot on the ground and the other still inside the doorway. In front of them is the fuzzy shape of a man, close enough to the camera that we see him from his upper legs to his neck, walking into the frame. The background we see through the open door: the mosque’s interior and a row of lights.

Are the girls sisters? Are they looking forward to breaking their daily fast? They’re happy and expectant, so we feel hopeful for them too.

The composition of these images seems both akimbo and ordered, in what Kashi calls “spontaneous ‘uncomposition.’” The images are part street photography, part documentary and always surprising. “I often shoot from the hip,” Kashi writes. “It is precisely the uncontrolled circumstances sparking these images that gives them their vitality and surprise.”

That phrase perfectly describes the activity in his 2007 photograph of the Ganapati Festival in Vadhav, India. Magenta powder coats the participants. It must have coated Kashi, too, because the celebrants are within arm’s reach of the lens. “I value the moments when there is no distinction between my tools, my subject, and myself,” he writes.

Images like these put him in the middle of others’ lives, engaging them in moments that would otherwise be lost.

Stephen Wolgast holds the Knight Chair in audience and community engagement news at the University of Kansas. His email is [email protected]. He has been an NPPA member since 1994.

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