Have you ever seen an image or photograph that drove you to
imagine all of the circumstances leading up to the final capture of the
moment?
Or, have your eyes had the experience of delivering such staggering sentiments to your brain that your body physically reacts?
These are the moments that photographers strive to capture with every
flash and snap they take. To encapsulate human and physical elements
in such a way that they continue living in a static, unchanging
environment is what truly makes a photographer an artist. One such
artist, Platon, has paved his own route in making the characters in his photographs seemingly divulge their darkest secrets to the viewer.
I was lucky enough to receive two tickets to the Richmond Forum this
past Saturday, reveling in quite an adult affair for this recent college
grad. Dressed in my best evening wear and with curls in my hair, I
waited anxiously in my red, plush seat in the historic Landmark Theater.
Unsure of what to expect, I did some research on this Platon guy,
nearly skeptical of this mononymous person of certain celebrity. On my
small mobile screen, his photos looked sharp, with his subjects having
the most recognized mugs in the world.
“Ok,” I thought, “I’ll give this guy my attention.”
The next two hours I was on the edge of my seat, being taken, along with the audience, on a universal tour of human emotions.
Image by image, slide by slide, one could hear the resonating
gasps and
ahhs of
the audience as we had huge photographs of both public figures and
embattled human beings placed before us on a large projector screen.
Platon let the photograph sink in before recanting the story of each
interaction with his subject. Never before have I seen such powerful
images that entirely boils down someone’s persona, and in a sense,
animates them. Along with his amusing, heartfelt, and even unsettling
stories about the time he spent shooting these individuals, these photos
proved that visual images are more powerful than ever
.
To evoke such reactions is to be a visual image master.
Now master he may be, Platon is also a person of modesty. While
there is no doubt that his portfolio is world renowned, Platon focuses
more on the content than the communicator. In the Q&A session
following his presentation, the moderator asked him about some of his
techniques. Platon answered, simply, that it is not in the technique or
the equipment that he focuses on. Rather, it is ensuring that he
captures the essence of his subject matter and that his photo can
communicate effectively the content it holds.
Wow. Platon got down to the fundamentals with this statement. He
knows that photos are more than images; they are messages.
As the excited chattering lingered on, I felt an odd feeling
tinkering on my consciousness: My experience with the visual
storytelling actually increased my ability to understand things that are
larger than me. And as cliché as it is, this proves that a picture is
indefinitely worth a thousand words.
This blog post was written by Maggie Young and shared here with permission. The original post can be found here.
