Jason Parham is a senior writer for WIRED. Depth of Field is his weekly dispatch about culture's most searing current images.
John MacDougall’s portrait-style capture of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson—taken during a press conference in Berlin on Wednesday, where intense talks of Brexit continued—works a bit like a portal. It transports. It flirts with memory, tests knowledge. It is an image of many images. Typically, I would say photos fall into two distinct categories. There are those that carry a density of self, images of such presence and posture that the viewer adds very little to their overall import. The second type, which MacDougall’s photo falls under, bear a charming hollowness. They’re plain but deceptively layered configurations; that is, they help us to see more than what we see before us. It’s not that they are vacant a narrative. Instead, they welcome additional narratives, pyramid-like, one atop another.Related Stories
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