From a Note to Ernest C.

Of course all still photos are motionless; the only motion involved are the saccades the viewer’s eye makes. Moving the camera (or the subject) doesn’t guarantee a dynamic photo. Some frozen-action photos of Cartier-Bresson – for example, the deathless “Brailowsky” shot – are dynamic in the only way possible to stills: they’re charged with the sense of motion. They goose the eyeballs into gear. I believe your impressionist work (and impressionism generally) is in essence static and flat. Your “static” geometric photos have more action and more depth than those meant to show motion. (Footnote: what could be more active and dynamic than an abstract, or still life, by Kline or Gorki or de Kooning? What more static than the ultra-impressionist paintings of Seurat and Signac?)

Remember that motion is an artifact of perception. We’re wired to perceive events in time series. But there are other kinds of motion, for example the way a character ambles through the plot of a novel, or the way our mind wanders when we contemplate puzzle pictures like Escher’s woodcuts or Dali’s slippery oils. There are many ways to make an image move, and to make a moving photo.