“No matter how artful the photographer,” Benjamin asserts, “no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now, with which reality has so to speak seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.
“This long exposure time, which “caused the subject to focus his life in the moment rather than hurrying past it,” parallels the beholders subsequent engagement in front of the work.
Benjamin as quoted by Christopher Ho in the text, “Within and Beyond, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Crowd”" that was published in PAJ (performance art journal).