Mont Blanc from the valley floor · Chamonix, France
Twenty years of drawing the body taught me that a picture is not a record of a thing — it is an argument about its form. Get the form right and beauty is not something you add. It is what is left.
Mont Blanc does not reveal itself. It withholds. For three days the massif stayed inside its own weather, and the town below went about its business at the foot of something it could not see.
What the mountain teaches is scale, and scale is the hardest thing to photograph. A summit flattens into a pale triangle unless you can find something human in the frame to argue with it — a cable car strung across the void, a paraglider the size of a thumbnail, two bronze men on a plinth in the square.
There is a word in Japanese — ma — for the interval between things. Not empty space but charged space: the pause that gives the note its shape, the gap in a hedge that frames the hill behind it.
Tokyo appears to have none of it. Ginza at night is a solid wall of light. Shinjuku gives the eye nowhere to rest. But stand still on a platform at rush hour and the crowd opens and closes around you in a rhythm, and there it is — interval, everywhere, moving.
A city is a set of strangers agreeing, for a few seconds, to occupy the same rectangle. The portrait you get on the street is never really of a person. It is of a decision — to look up, to look away, to keep walking.
The village is the opposite problem. In Gordes nobody is a stranger and nothing is passing through, so the photograph has to be about the stone.
The hardest place to photograph is the one you drive through every day. Familiarity does the opposite of what attention does — it files things away so you stop having to look at them.
Eggleston's answer was to photograph the tricycle and the freezer and the ceiling, on the grounds that the ordinary is only ordinary because nobody has framed it yet. Cincinnati at six in the evening, under a highway, is not a lesser subject than a French village. It just has fewer people agreeing in advance that it is worth the trouble.
Formasura is the photographic work of Joshua Klein. By day he is a medical illustrator — Director of Illustration at the Neurosurgical Atlas — which means he spends a great deal of time deciding which edges of a form to keep and which to let go dark.
Photography is that same discipline pointed at the world instead of the body. The subjects change; the question does not. What is the structure underneath this, and how little can I show and still make it beautiful?
Formasura is a small alteration of formosura — Portuguese for beauty. The word descends from the Latin formosus, meaning well-formed. Which is to say that in Portuguese, beauty was never a quality added to a thing. It is what happens when the form is right.
Medical and neurosurgical illustration lives at medbilden.com.