Moments of exposure • Richard Johnstone

Moments of exposure • Richard Johnstone

In his new collection of eight wide-ranging essays, the distinguished photographer Michael Collins makes a plea for the art of close observation. The viewer’s role is to look, not merely to glance and then move on, forever under pressure to get to the next image. “Photography’s ubiquity is its nemesis,” he laments, because ubiquity begets scrolling, and scrolling is the enemy of reflection. This contrast between the rewards of attention to the s…