The Documentary Moment and the Revelation at Hand

The photographs not taken are as legion as the stories heard but never recorded. Like the field note never registered on paper, what remains is the memory, born of that instantaneous thing—the moment. The documentary artist attempts, however imperfectly, to do something about what they witness, how they feel, what they are compelled to say. That doing and making becomes, in turn, an extension of the initial instant—and of the memory—an effort, as Eudora Welty wrote, “imprisons a moment in time.”