David Armstrong's The SIlver Cord

In David Armstrong’s The Silver Cord, he limits his photographs to black and white portraits and blurry images of nature, buildings, or sculptures. To me, it is not completely clear as to how he came up with the sequence of photographs. At first, it appears that the viewer is taking a journey to see the people in the photographs that immediately follow. However, then this idea will break, seemingly without reason, and there will be a blank black or white page, one blurry nature shot placed in between several sharp portrait shots, a sculpture that is suddenly in focus, or a portrait shot that is suddenly blurry. Because of this nonsensical order, it is helpful to the viewer that most of the pages that face each other have a similarity to each other. For example, there will be two men embracing each other in a loving way on each facing page, or an interesting combination is how he places a very soft photograph of tree branches next to a photograph of a man, who you can see the shadow of branches on his shirt and back. The softness of the branches look so much like the shadows that it is clear how these two photographs work perfectly together, and should only be placed next to each other.

I picked up this book because I saw plenty of portrait photographs, where the people consumed most of the frames, and the backgrounds were not nearly as important as the people. Their facial expressions look blank, but on the serious side, which attracted me. It immediately made connections with my book’s photographs because of this framing and set up, and because of the lack of expression in many photos, yet how much you can still tell the person is aware of the photographer and the camera. The facial expressions are all serious, but look like they are all most likely posing for the camera, and trying to portray themselves in a way that they think will work the best for them. The framing of each photograph is different, and depends on the contents of the shot; some will be taken from the thighs up, and others will be framed tighter to only include the person’s head and shoulders. I appreciated this because sometimes the person’s outfit truly added to the details of the photograph and describing the subject.

The book begins with a series of blurry street shots, and ends in the same way, leading me to feel as if he encountered all of these people, and ended up right back where he started. The blurred effect gives the feeling of being lost and confused on a journey, and that every time he stops and stays with these people, his world is still for the moment until he has to, yet again, be on his way.

Overall, I found the photographs interesting because I enjoy examining facial expressions and reading body language, and that was what really made me look a little closer at this book after flipping through others.