Afterimage by Nina Strand:

The idea of the recently published book The Photograph That Changed My Life is simple: over 50 photographers, musicians, collectors and actors are invited to ‘write from the heart’, as editor Zelda Cheatle explains in the blurp, about the most important photograph they have seen. Contributors include Adam Bromberg, Nan Goldin and David George.

The American photographer Alex Prager chose this still from Neša Paripović’s film N.P. 1977, in which the artist depicts his walk through Belgrade, as he moves with swift determination, taking shortcuts to get to wherever he is headed as fast as he can. The film was shown at Trondheim Kunsthall some years ago, and as the press release states, Paripović ‘uses the city as a mirror in which individual identity is constructed’. Prager writes that, having just begun producing scenes that walk a line between reality and artifice, she finds in this shot of Paripović’s leap across rooftops ‘the perfect balance of a meticulously staged scenario joined with the raw and wild’.

For this column, where every writer describes an image that they find impossible to get out of their mind, I’ve chosen this still, because it keeps me hanging on after having closed the book. This jump could end tragically, and those who haven’t seen the film don’t know the outcome. The uncertainty reminds me of the fate of the 75-year-old French adventurer Jean-Jacques Savin, who recently died while attempting to row across the Atlantic Ocean. Savin, who had crossed the ocean before in a large barrel, described the trip as a way to ‘laugh at old age’.

I was rooting for him to make the trip, since it would be a beautiful statement on the fact that age doesn’t matter. And even though he failed, it still is, since anyone could have died in the same conditions. Seen in this light, Paripović’s jump and hasty tour of the city also become a salute to the fact that anything is possible in any part of one’s life.