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Photography by Mandelbrot
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Photography by Mandelbrot
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Photography by Mandelbrot
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Photography by Mandelbrot
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Photography by Mandelbrot
One summer I began taking pictures of people on the street surreptitiously, by holding the camera at my waist and aiming it at passersby when they were about six feet away. It was important to avoid eye contact and to keep walking as I pressed the shutter. When the film was developed I would find images that I could not remember having taken.
What was most surprising was how much the subjects of these photographs seemed so intensely to inhabit their gestures—something rarely seen in photographs. In a gesture or a glance, these people passing by and glimpsed invisibly in a split second were present as they never are when observed directly.
Later I recognized some of these gestures as belonging to the movies: great actors on screen achieve the same thing by learning to inhabit themselves just as these people do: naturally, that is. They achieve a natural state in the most artificial of media.
