I call this photo “dogcart,” and I think it is perfect.
The first things to mention about it is that it is not mine, I don’t know anything about where it is or who took it, and that it can never, ever be taken again.
My assumptions are that it is taken with a large format camera in eastern Europe some time in the early 20th Century, in the early years of photography but prior to the emergence, or widespread use of, colour film. I believe it was hand-coloured.
The reason I say this, and again these are assumptions, is that although I think the colouring is beautifully done, the colours are idealised, and a little too primary. Look at those reds. Look at those greens. And the gold of the brass vessels is not only pure and uniform, but it is a little too close to the colour of the boy’s hat, although subtly different from the woman’s.
The composition is borrowed from painting. All elements are included, nothing is extraneous. One might actually believe it to be a painting, but for the glance across to the photographer by the woman on the far left, breaking the “fourth wall.” There is the cart; there is the beast (strangely, a dog) of burden harnessed to the front and patiently resting; there are the brass containers arranged within it; there is the woman pouring the liquid, denoting the function; and there is the customer, the boy in the hat, waiting by. In the far right of the composition, there is an indicator of a path, and a road leading off into the distance with a building to the left, and further buildings farther off.
Look at perfect diagonal alignment of the hats, parallel to the line of the bank of trees behind them and of the cart and the beams leading to the dog, resting against the path that leads it out of the composition to the left, thereby marking its immediate future of once again hauling the wares to the next town.
Why is the brass vessel sitting by the wheel? For no compositional meaning: it is there as an indicator of the essence of the transaction.
It is a carefully thought-out composition. The camera would clearly have been on a tripod, as it would have been a large, cumbersome device that would have taken time to set up; to focus; to recompose as the shift in focus altered the composition; to focus again; to set correct exposure on the lens, to remove the darkslide; to inform the girl to commence pouring; to trip the shutter; and at this point the woman breaks that wall.
It is possible the photographer would have felt the need to make another exposure, to allow the scene the integrity of having the woman act more naturally. Again, this is a guess, but I don’t think this would necessarily have been a consideration. The composition is inspired by painting, but was photography seen as art? The compositional rigidity would have been important, but the pretense of the absence of observer?
The photo is essentially what would now be termed “street photography.” But there are differences, technological and conceptual.
This photograph can never be taken again. Not simply because the people in it have long passed away; not because the way of life described in the picture is now a thing of the past; and not because the landscape in that area would have been irrevocably altered by time and progress. Not even because photographic technology has long moved on, and colours would be more accurate, and there would have been no need to spend so much time composing.
This photo can never be taken again because painting composition is no longer the reference for photographs: other photographs are.
Where this photographer may have envisaged this composition as the way a painting would have been conceived, photographers now, like the microcomputer in a modern camera, have a bank of past photos in their memories to inform their composition, and these compositions would have been created from real life situations, fleeting moments, not idealized compositions in the mind of an artist attempting to seize the essence of an action. They are the hostage of a preconceived emphasis on minutiae of repeated events conceived through the filter of mere decades of photographic convention.
The photographer, one presumes, felt it necessary to record the essence of a common transaction here, that he may even have felt was going to be lost to time even back then. He is recording an idealised process, not the minutiae of the moment. He is mindful of past painters; not beholden to past photographers.
I started by saying this photo was perfect, but it isn’t, really. It is perfect for me.
For me, the essence of photography comes from the artistic impulse to reflect reality from within your own terms, not those of others.
This photographer used images he knew of for his own frame of reference. Photographers nowadays use photographic conventions for theirs. The reason I love this photo is that, viewed now, it is divorced from both of these.
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