August 22, 2003
Details
My mother is fond of telling me that I don't “give enough details” when I'm reporting news and such during our regular phone calls. She attributes this failing to gender, assuring me that my sister meets or exceeds her expectations in this department. I guess sometimes I'm feeling chatty and sometimes not, it's a mood thing.
There is no question, however, as to the value of details when writing prose or making photographs. In a sense, that's what it's all about in fact. When writing is good, details construct the scene… they transport you. The same multiplicity of detailed elements makes up imagery, be it painting, drawing or photographs. Most importantly, in both cases the writer or the artist has chosen the details they present. This construction is both what makes the end result creative, and necessarily from a single point of view. The things I write or the images I make are slices of my reality, but they are also the slices I choose to present… the details I choose to share.
A moment I observed almost ten years ago still surfaces in my mind every now and again. I was taking the bus home from downtown on a unusually warm Saturday afternoon. I was sitting in the back, and directly in front of me was a man and woman, obviously a couple, probably in their late twenties. They looked both comfortable and content in their own skins, and with each other. I don't remember any other specific details about their appearance, except that the woman was wearing a tank top of sorts, showing the skin of her upper back and shoulders. I think they were attractive but not at all exceedingly or stereotypically so. What I really remember is that they weren't really talking or even looking at each other, but that the woman was very softly touching the back of the man's neck, right at the hairline, a sort of gentle, all most absent-minded caress… I thought it was the most beautiful instant… I remember wishing that I could somehow paint that moment, so that looking at the result might make people happy in a quiet and deep way.
That's today's detail.
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