Synecdoche

The Essence of Photography

Rubin, Coit Tower 3:15AM (2015) — a synecdoche of the famous monument.

Visual Synecdoche

The world is all around us, in 360 degrees, all the time, rich in visual data, and a photograph is a tiny little rectangle we use to clip out a small bit of visual space. We don’t show everything, we show this frame. And we expect that small frame to represent more than just that slice.

Adam Savage and the Maltese Falcon (Rubin, 2008)
Alma Lavenson, Self Portrait (1932)
(L) Musician Joan Baez (Rubin, 1998), and (R) Artist Gronk (Rubin, 2015)
(L) Film Editor Kate Sanford (Rubin, 2015) and (R) Musician Butterscotch (Rubin, 2016)

Temporal Synecdoche

Photos also slice a teeny fraction of a second from the infinite continuum that is time. I take this 125th of a second and save it, and use it to represent all these seconds, all these moments — of the party, of the vacation, of my afternoon. This is also a kind of synecdoche — a split second representing a event.

Temporal synecdoche of my daughter. At left, (2019) after months of driving around together practicing, this was the moment of her driver’s test. I didn’t need more than one image to capture that period of our lives together. At right (2012) a moment excised from hundreds of similar moments of us playing gin in San Francisco.

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Living a creative life, a student of high magic, and hopefully growing wiser as I age. • Ex-Lucasfilm, Netflix, Adobe. • Here are my stories and photos.

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M. H. Rubin

Living a creative life, a student of high magic, and hopefully growing wiser as I age. • Ex-Lucasfilm, Netflix, Adobe. • Here are my stories and photos.