The Master of the "Freeze-Frame" – The Digital Journalist

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I don’t know if Douglas Kirkland has ever thought of becoming a director, but all his images contain the rich, contradictory synthesis of the stills from a successful film. If he had become a director instead of a great photographer, he would have told stories of men and women on the run from reality, reckless lovers considered mad by the world around them, exalted in their attempt to make sense of the events in life which nobody around them can understand. The perfect stills in his book, Freeze Frame, in my opinion, make up his film. It does not matter that the story refers you back to other famous films; all directors quote the colleagues they love and Douglas uses them to narrate his film. The camera (let’s call it that) focuses on the central characters – isolated, laughing, tired, concentrated, in thought, arm in arm, in a trance, but always detached and far from the universe surrounding them, the universe to which they seem not to belong. A world which looks at them with indifference, as though they were misfits desperately searching for a connection, for an impossible story.

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