Gravity / Antigravity

The float, the weight...

9.8 m/s²

“Quantity has a quality all its own”. Hundreds of images for the photo series “The Window” have been taken for the 24/7/365/1 project. Meaning can be an emergent property — content gained through context — so more images allow more interconnections across the shots as they are grouped or juxtaposed. So the below pairing is gravity. The woman, suspended in the air like a snowflake, the man, heavy on the ground from his injury. The float, the weight.

(More images from “The Window” at www.nu4ya.com )

NOTES:
Every photo in the series is of an ephemeral moment — a split-second lightning flash, a few-second hug, a once-in-seventeen year eclipse, a hundred-year-pandemic. For the photo of the woman I noticed the giant spring snowflakes coming down and so took some shots. Only later did I see the woman was caught mid-air. For the man lying on the ground, I first heard a sound, looked out and quickly photographed him just before he got up and stumbled off. It wasn’t until editing the photo later that I saw the blood on his leg.

The “quantity” quote has been attributed to Stalin discussing how the sheer volume of Russian soldiers thrown at the Germans will defeat them. But I prefer the comparison to how On Kawara’s huge volume of calendar date paintings become more powerful the more there are of them — the gestalt imbuing each individual work with more contextual meaning. Paradoxically, volume also allows the personal — “There’s my birthday” for the date paintings, or “Oh I know that feeling” amidst the range of stories in The Window...

9.832 m/s² is the force of gravity at the poles and 9.789 m/s² at the equator. So move to Ecuador if you want to lose some weight.