Damien Demolder considers...
Your mother may have told you that first impressions last, and then explained how to make that impression a good one. Brushing hair was probably involved, as might have been clean shoes and nails, smelling as though you’d washed recently and sporting fresh underwear in case of an accident. She may have instilled into you the idea that on first meeting a person a whole range of details need to be attended to in order to present an air of someone well put together. That new acquaintance might not examine the individual elements of our carefully constructed endeavour to conceal our inadequacies, but would unconsciously be taken in by their combined persuasive force and spontaneously come to trust we are decent sorts.
I suspect we work from impressions far more than we would like to admit, and are quick to form judgements in our subconscious without picking over the details of the evidence before us with due care and attention. When asked why we like or dislike someone or something we aren’t always immediately sure, but somewhere along the line we have developed a feeling that has stuck.
In our photography we spend less time thinking about creating impressions than perhaps we could. Very often it is easier to concentrate on the small details and on ensuring we present things with clarity, but promoting clarity and detail might be at odds with the way we experience the world. We meet someone for five minutes and form an impression, we walk into a restaurant and immediately form an impression, we walk through a town and gradually form an impression. But we rarely photograph impressions.
Glimpsed scene
What I love about this picture by Glynis Harrison is that it gives me an impression, and it’s an impression of something that appeals to me. Identifying the physical objects in the frame is quite secondary to the feeling I get, in this glimpse of the scene, from the sense of the shafts of sunlight making patterns on the sheets. The view is a glance, a motion, a split second’s perception as I pass by, enter the room or leave it. It isn’t a scrutiny, an inspection of the details, or an analysis – it’s an awareness, a sense, a feeling for a moment. And it’s all rather beautiful.
