Slow Down
I’d like to share with you one of my all-time favourite movie scenes – from the somewhat overlooked 1995 film, Smoke. In this film, Harvey Keitel plays Auggie, the owner of a tobacco shop. Auggie’s pet project is to photograph his tobacco shop. Every day he goes across the street and takes, what is basically […]
I’d like to share with you one of my all-time favourite movie scenes – from the somewhat overlooked 1995 film, Smoke. In this film, Harvey Keitel plays Auggie, the owner of a tobacco shop. Auggie’s pet project is to photograph his tobacco shop. Every day he goes across the street and takes, what is basically the same shot, from the same location, of the same street-side at the same time of day – he has a collection of over 4000 images taken in this way.
In this scene one of his regular customers, Paul, a grief-filled writer played by William Hurt, comes into the store one evening and they start talking about Auggie’s photographic project.
There’s a lot that can be said about this scene – it speaks evocatively to the power of photography, to capture not just a moment (that’s such a cliche), but to capture life. The lesson we could all learn from Auggie is to slow down enough to see what we are photographing, what is living in our images.
Tonight I’ll be boarding a flight for Adelaide and taking a few days rest over Chinese New Year. It’s been a tough few months and I’m looking forward to slowing down. As Auggie says, “You know how it is, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow…”
