They stopped moving — his fingers, that is. Then his horn was gone. They had become irrelevant to the conversation; the solo landed hard — in the pit of my stomach. Visceral. The physicality of the medium was just gone. The reception was perfect, raw, emotional — a direct, subconscious transfer of emotion that bypassed brains and conscious thought on both ends.

I was a jazz musician then — ten feet away from Phil Woods playing a solo I will never forget. I knew enough to understand what I was witnessing. Mechanics mastered, instrument gone, something flowing straight from wherever it comes from directly to wherever it goes in whoever is listening.

Sometimes — rarely — I felt this from the other side. I never presumed my own playing evoked anything of the sort in others, but I knew the sensation myself, from inside the music.

Serious photography came to me later. I knew what to listen for.

—

My collection of photography monographs is not an acquisitive collection, nor an investment collection, nor a trophy collection. It continues to be built in my quest to refine and expand my ability to see. Some days I am on a grail quest. Others I am Don Quixote.

Jim Welninski led a photo walk in Chicago where we first met, and we got along well enough to walk together again before I ended up taking a couple of his online classes. I haven’t been in touch with him in years, but I think he was on a similar quest, further into it than I was at the time. He recommended the work of Susan Burnstine. I tracked down Absence of Being and opened it without knowing what I was walking into. What happened next is difficult to describe precisely, which should tell you something. The closest I can get is this: it is a direct emotion dump. You forget what you are looking at and you simply feel it. The object — the photograph, the page, the book in your hands — disappears. What remains is a state. You are in it before you know you entered it.

Burnstine makes her cameras by hand. The optics are compromised by design — toy lenses, plastic, pinholes, found objects. The resulting images are soft where they should be sharp, dark where they should be readable, uncertain where photography is expected to deliver fact. Impasse, from Absence of Being, shows a solitary figure walking toward the camera across what is almost certainly the Brooklyn Bridge. What these images produce is not a failure to document. It is a different kind of truth — the truth of psychological states, of memory, of presence felt rather than seen. Nothing is sharp. Everything is clear.

Alexey Titarenko uses time as his instrument. His long exposures dissolve moving figures into a textured, unidentifiable mass while everything fixed — building facades, railings, stairwells — stays sharp, set as if in stone. Vasileostrovskaya Metro Station, View of the Crowd from the Top of the Stairs, 1992, from The City Is a Novel, works this way: a crowd becomes texture, the architecture around it holds still, and at the boundary between the two, an occasional hand or a half-lingering face registers just long enough to remind you that the texture was once made of people. It is like humanity emerging from, or more likely receding into, a very dark cloud.

Ernst Haas's The American West holds an image of a handful of horses running in a line, either away from something or toward something else — possibly a still image made during one of his Marlboro commercial sessions. It doesn’t matter. Colorado, 1978, page 200, dissolves the animals into energy, color, and blur, the line of motion outrunning the bodies that made it. The specific horses are gone. Only velocity and light remain. Nothing is sharp. Everything is clear.

—

Different instruments, different decades, different mediums. It didn’t matter. The same transfer happened anyway. Whatever moved from them to me crossed the distance, the same way it crossed the ten feet between Woods and a kid in the front row.

The visceral revitalization when the power of an image — or a solo — evokes a physical response before the brain has a chance to analyze it is rare but worth listening for.