Capturing Consequence 15/15
There are three kinds of pictures women take with men.
The first kind, you never see the man at all.
He’s cropped out, cut away, reduced to implication.
That’s the suppression of presence — when the other’s existence is acknowledged only by its erasure.
The second kind is the prop photo.
It’s the stand-behind moment: the image with Santa Claus, the novelty, the tourist encounter, the cultural curiosity.
These photos say, I was near something interesting, but never, I was near someone consequential.
That’s the imagery of crowdsourcing — adjacency mistaken for authorship.
And then there’s the rarest photo of all:
The picture of presence.
The one where the subject wants to capture the shared gravity of being beside another presence.
That’s authorship — not a reaction, not a pose, but a record of mutual consequence.
Showing proximity to capturing causality.
The same shift that divides passive investors from authored markets, the same line between aggregation and intention.
The first two pictures are of the crowd.
The third is of the author.
