It was almost half year ago since
I opened the book and I found this beautiful line of Robert Frost poem. Usually
the line is repeated twice as how it is actually written, reading this one fine
cut-line is new for me. It is like the lines continues even I did not read the
previous lines and the last line. The whole poem is just like sesomnating in my
head, and I know where the book is going to take me, an endless journey.
There was something different
with the title, something intriguing; literally I translated the title, PASSING
is the activity of moving, “left to right or right to left” – Edy Purnomo. Most
photographs in the book are the activity of passing in the view of the
photographer’s eyes, but there’s more than meets the eye. The title itself has
intrigued me, before the age of photograph the ‘activity of moving’ is not
something recordable in an image. But since the finest invention of photography
human has the ultimate power to stop time in the very tiny detail and specific
time, and later visual interpretation of the image was born. I never said that I
don’t see people passing in the book, but what my plain eyes see is, people
stop. They stop in the frame, they are walking but they are stopped. Since the
first click made, by the power given to the photograph, they stops, time stops.
This is why the title was very
interesting to me, I see a movement, I see a process, I see a journey in a
magical-freezed moment in the photographs. It seems like the movement, the
journey (which I might say as the process) still continues. Since the ‘click’, the
real world continues, and a whole new world was created. Unlike Bresson’s
decisive moment which the analogy was like a total stop (photo of jumping man
in Gare Saint Lazare), a choking to death, a breathless specific detail of
moment (it took all my breath away), the term ‘passing’ gives us a moment to
breath, a moment to think, and a moment to stop. PASSING, provides time and
space even the moment is stopped. Just like the “stopping by woods on a snowy
evening” (seriously you should read the poem!). Reading the poem is like
enjoying this book; the author was divided in the different worlds created by
the separator. In the power of poetry, I see there were two character in the
Frost’s poem; him who still stopped in the lovely-dark woods, and him who
continue his journey. There was also something in the way people tell a story of
photographs. The same way like how Mas Edy tells story about each frame in the
book, there was something like a closed folder of memories representing every
single photograph. And when he goes to one of them, the folder was opened and
the memory plays just like a vivid drama in his mind. So in every photograph
the author is just like creating his own character of himself with a really
short play of a certain time.
I re-opened the book yesterday, I
re-read the book, and I came to the last frame in the book. In the first time, I
consider the closing is representing ‘a family’, after we have our never ending
journey; someone is born as a family and they mostly end up as a family (too). What
I have just realized yesterday that the journey never stops, the last frame is
the closing of the book, not the journey itself. It is portrayed there that the
father and son was on their journey (in a river), which indicates that even the
closing is unfinished. The photograph stop, but we cannot deny that the process
continues.
This book was memories, it was a footstep,
it was process where we all human, have our own ‘PASSING’ as our own endless
journey.
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Malang, 2013
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Malang, 2013
