Chris Clarke investigates the critical stance adopted by Stephen Ahern, winner of the Gallery of Photography and Irish Arts Review Artist’s Award
The selection of a particular scene or setting as a photographic subject often relies on an instinctual, aesthetic response. This intuitive reaction is a way of cutting past the extraneous and the unnecessary in order to locate a precise instant, a ‘decisive moment’ in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s terminology. The choice of subject therefore seems to adjudge a specific shot as somehow more worthy, more ‘interesting’, than all those other potential, possible photographs that have been passed over and never taken.
