Silence and Motion

When I thought about silence, I kept coming back to what Irene said in class about silence being entangled with noise; such as our pauses between words and sentences. So I felt as though my visualization needed to convey my fascination with the concept of silence as a part of a larger whole that incorporates both silence and noise. I envisioned silence just before or after something completes a fall, the silence of the fall itself. This idea felt similar to the phrase “the quiet before the storm.” For me, this “quietness” or silence before noise was captured through a photograph of a raindrop as it rolls off the tip of a leaf. Ultimately the drop will break its fall to create both sound and movement but the moments before that plop into the water and subsequent ripple effect seem silent to me. This is especially true in photographs, which can capture moments and extend them, making them appear clear and motionless. The capture itself is a kind of silencing, because whatever was in motion will stay forever poised, locked in the silence occurring before the drop. A person who looks at a photograph sees the frozen moment and anything else they see or hear is imagined and shaped by their own interpretation and expectations of that moment.