GOLD LIST Special Edition #4 Photography

ALLAN KLIGER – JUST AROUND THE CORNER-

by The Editors of Art Market April 24, 2019

ALLAN KLIGER. – JUST AROUND THE CORNER-

ALLAN KLIGER © Article on Art Market Magazine GOLD LIST Special Edition #4

Emotion – We all know what emotion is, don’t we? Or rather, we know what it looks like when we see it in someone else, and we know what it is when feeling it ourselves. There it is. That word.
FEELING. It’s inextricably tied to emotion, to the emotive state.
Are they the same? Most dictionaries define emotion as a psychological state that arises spontaneously rather than through conscious effort, often accompanied by physiological changes. An instinctive state derived from one’s circumstance or relationship with others. In photography, it’s often what separates a great image from one that’s not. One that makes us stop, to study, to connect, to identify, to smile or feel pain, but in the end to feel something. To feel connected to the world around us.
We Are Social Creatures.
Seeing an emotional expression in another makes us feel.

ALLAN KLIGER © Article on Art Market Magazine GOLD LIST Special Edition #4

It brings us into that vignette, into that experience. Sometimes unwillingly, often by choice. It’s what I look for when I shoot. I want to feel alive, to feel alerted and aware of the world and it’s people around me and so when I see an expression of emotion I am driven to capture it. To freeze it forever. Perhaps to later relive being there, perhaps to kick start, like a jolt of current or caffeine, just for that moment, what it feels like to be alive. Sort of like when we’re healthy we can take it for granted because we don’t really feel anything, but when we’re feeling sick, only then do we know how good it feels to not be sick. To feel, to be in the space of another’s emotion, makes me feel, makes me appreciate, that I’m not simply a bag of bones but
sentient, spiritual being.

And so I look for emotive moments, for people in the throes of something emotional to them. Laughing, crying, fighting, playing, dancing, loving. Just not merely existing. But living. And when I see that, when I’m near to that, I throw myself into the moment to capture it. No boundary, no space. Right there, part of that moment. Feeling that moment and shooting by touch, by feeling and instinct, the joy or pain, while at the same time being dispassionate as I’m composing, lighting, dancing for the best angle. Being drawn in by the moment but separate from it, too. And, at the end, feeling that I was witness to something ineffable, that I, too, was alive.

ALLAN KLIGER – JUST AROUND THE CORNER-

ALLAN KLIGER. – JUST AROUND THE CORNER-

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