A wave of rich magenta and deep red pulses through the cover image of Ed Kashi’s Abandoned Moments, wrapping itself around the spine and landing midway through the back cover, unveiling the subtitle, “A Love Letter to Photography.” The image, with its thoughtful, full-bleed spread is a fitting reflection of Kashi’s book project in many ways. Not only does it unveil his aesthetic prowess and technical adeptness, it articulates a charged but fleeting moment – a spark – between subject and photographer amidst the energy and chaos of the external events. Abandoned Moments is full of such sparks, photographs that entice individually, while collectively testifying to the potency and breadth of Kashi’s 40-year career. 

The images, stripped of their original context as elements within photojournalistic pieces, take on new and expanded meanings. As Alison Nordström eloquently writes in the book’s forward, “(Abandoned Moments) is both a departure from this lifetime of work, and a consummation of it, a carefully edited and sequenced personal selection of images drawn from decades of projects, reordered, recontextualized, and accompanied by a new and expressive text. These images were once made to preserve a specific moment, to inform, but also to illustrate a point and a point of view. Now, freed from that necessity by their new use, they become the subject of an authorial perspective that has often been downplayed and intentionally unexpressed.” 

The design elements within the book reinforce Kashi's authorship, and uniquely expand upon the reflections of his experiences. Upon opening the book, the reader is greeted by endsheets featuring black paper with white text filled with hand-written words, repeating and layered in varying opacities and scales. The phrases “happenstance,” “less controlled,” “different kind of precision,” “serendipity,” and “impulsive act” consume the pages. The meanings of the phrases are underscored by such design decisions, as they seem to echo and bounce as if we are hearing Kashi speak them to himself. They provide a contemplative entry point into the book’s sequence, and solidify the shift of context from the world of photojournalism to that of autobiography. Throughout the book, blocks of first-person text from Kashi balance with blank pages to give brief respite to the energy that transfers from scene to scene, image to image. The first of such texts provides insight into the book's title, stating, “As a young photographer seeking to reconcile the chaos of life, I stumbled upon a method of photographic observation, in which geometry, mood, emotion, and possibility – the instant – unite to create something new but unintended. I call this the abandoned moment; a concept that has run through my photographic approach for over forty years.” 

Kashi leads with his intuition. His technical and aesthetic fluency in each of his works comes through in his balance of light, intimate subject distance, wide angle of view, and immersion into the environment and space. His images convey a sense of play – a call and response – and the sequence as a whole seems to further this point. 

The book is a good size, allowing each image more physical space on the page than it might have seen in its original publication format. The size allows the viewer access to the depth and detail of each image, and to the humanity of the subjects within the frames. The images are rich. They are alive. Timeless. Chaotic. Intimate. Through the book we are invited to sit with each image in the context of the others: to look closer, and for longer, into Kashi’s unique blend of time, space, and location.

All images are copyright Ed Kashi from the book Abandoned Moments: A Love Letter to Photography published by Kehrer Verlag.

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Details:
• Hardcover
• 30 x 24 cm
•136 pages
•42 color and 26 b/w illustrations
•English
•ISBN 978-3-96900-044-1
•2021