DARIN HAYTON

Tag: Fragments

  • Fragments Red

    Fragments Red

    I recently finished another book project, “Fragments Red.” This volume will be the first of a seven-volume project, each pairing photographs with reflections of different sorts.

    Color photo of a booklet, partially open to the photo of a cliff.
    Working on the first volume of Fragments. The fourth draft.

    A handful of drafts, each with a number of changes. Then there was the layout and design issues, where to put gatefolds, how to bind them, solving pagination issues. It was all so much fun.

    Color photo of a a pile of draft booklets, and some final pages, showing a man in a subway car.
    A pile of drafts of volume one of Fragments, and some early printed pages.

    After I spent a evening or two printing the pages, I made a jig to make drilling the holes in the pages easier and consistent. Then I painted some covers, found some matching thread to use for the binding (a version of “Japanese stab binding”), and sewed them up. Soon I had a dozen or so booklets.

    Color photograph of a couple booklets with red covers. One is open to the title page.
    Final copies of Fragments Red, with hand-painted covers and hand-stitched binding.

    It took a long time, but I find something so satisfying about making something. Now off to start working on volume two, Fragments Orange.

  • Fragments and Traces

    Fragments and Traces

    That a photograph must tell a story is commonplace. “Storytelling” has conquered every form of photography, from landscape to street photography to elaborately staged scenes. I prefer to see photographs as fragments, extraits from a now lost present. John Berger remarked on the gap between the moment photographed and the present, saying

    All photographs are of the past, and yet in them an instant of the past is arrested so that, unlike a lived past, it can never lead to the present.

    Urban #230727.1. Black and white photograph of a person ice skating showing just the skates on the ice.
    Urban #230727.1.

    Photographs, in being fragments contain only traces of their own immediate pasts. From those traces we imagine a thousand different possible pasts that remain entombed like some ancient insect in the amber of the past.

    Urban #230727.2. Black and white photograph of a person ice skating away, showing just the skates on the ice.
    Urban #230727.2.
  • Fragment

    Fragment

    It is common knowledge that a good photograph tells a story. Some go so far as to claim that “Every Photo Tells a Story.” More abstract photographs are surely exempted from this demand to tell a story. But what about other photographs? Do landscapes? Portraits? Astrophotography? Some, like street photography and documentary photography seem more like purveyors of stories. But what kind of story? And who composes that story? And for whom?

    How did this skull end up here, in the tall grass on the edge of campus?

    I want to try thinking about photographs as not telling a story but inviting the viewer to imagine a story. A photograph, in this way, doesn’t tell but rather asks. It encourages us to notice something and to try to explain it. Such a photograph asks us to reflect and to wonder.

    A photograph is wonderfully and invitingly just a fragment of an infinite number of stories. We can use that fragment to reconstruct any number of those stories.