What are photos?
It's something I've written briefly about before, but after being away and having lots of photos of my travels to look through it's a thought that has come back to me. I'm talking about photos in the snapshot sense, or perhaps in the "holiday photos" sense, rather than the pictures you would find in a gallery. I know a lot of people really love photos, love having them about; they stick them up around their room, have photos of their friends as their PC wallpaper and use photos as a sorce of comfort and familiarity.
I can't do this. I find photographs immensely powerful, they either make me feel alienated from a situation in the past, or make me feel isolated in that past time whilst everyone else is in the present, it's like being alone on a separate but identical planet Earth stuck in that single moment. That makes it sound worse than it is, I don't think these feelings are really a bad thing, if nothing else they are powerful and refreshing, when I feel like I want an emotional "hit" so to speak I whip out the photo album (or open the photos folder on the PC) and have a browse through. I don't take many pictures myself but when I do it makes these feelings even stronger. It's not just pictures of people that make me feel this way, often landscapes can be even more powerful, especially if they are of a deserted mountain vista, or most magnificently of all if they are looking out over some expanse of water.
On the other hand a really great photo as a piece of art is one that really draws me in, that can give me the same depth of feeling (though not necessarily the same feelings) as a photo with the added weight of a personal memory attached to it. The wonderful thing about a photograph by somebody else is that can give me that powerful feeling but it's not tied to one particular time, one particular event, I can take it wherever I want, place myself into it in whatever way I wish. I personally find photography one of the most powerful art forms because of this, indeed a good chunk of my time on the Internet is spent browsing for brilliant pictures, brilliant wallpapers to fit my mood and my view on the things around me at any particular time.
What are photos? For me, either powerful relics of the past, or (good photos at least) a form of artistic expression on a par with music.
Hi there- I just recently read your comments on qube blog. Sorry not to have noticed but I’ve been absent from my blog for a lot of the summer. I’ve posted replies, if you’re interested.
Re: photos, I agree that they are a powerful art form. One of my favorite. Photographs of my life always end up making me sad. You’re perceptive to point out the alienation they can make us feel. I have a friend who doesn’t own a camera for what I gather are some of the reasons discussed here.
I’ve always found it interesting that the still scene we observe in the photo is dependent on shutter speed. We see ourselves on paper, frozen in time, but the actual photograph represents several successive moments of our life; say 1/60th of a second. Life is continually in flux; it isn’t really comprised of ‘moments’ in any definable way. Any ‘moment’ can be broken down into further moments. So, seeing your life stopped, crammed into a moment, is a strange experience. You said, “it’s like being alone on a separate but identical planet Earth stuck in that single moment.” Maybe this is partly why.
That’s a really interesting point you make about the shutter speed, a picture being successive moments; I haven’t thought about it like that before. That stuck “moment” isn’t just that physical structure captured in the picture, but all the thoughts and feelings that circulate around that time; most of which are only visible in hindsight.