photographers paradox

 

Don’t look back. Be here now. Joy resides only in the present moment and never in the past or future. These are the words prescribed by the enlightened and the wise, and the words I’ve personally chosen to help guide my life (although admittedly don’t always adhere to). I believe that if we look beneath the surface of any work of art that truly moves us we will find that part of the energy that is drawing us in is that of immediacy. We absorb it, and it evokes in us something we vaguely recognize although may not be able to identify the reasons why. But the feeling is current…..it’s now……. and with it we step out of ordinary time and enter a surreal expanse that is in fact timeless and without bounds. We are home.

So what does this mean to the photographer who is busy with camera attempting to freeze a present moment and then inviting others to look “back” on it again and again after it has become the past? Isn’t this a paradox and counter to the notion of dwelling in the moment? Doesn’t this take us in a direction away from the delight of now?

Sometimes I look at photographs and feel a heaviness inside as they take me back with them to a time that is no longer. I miss what I see in the image that is gone from me. This may be a person I loved, a place I can no longer visit, or an innocence I can no longer claim to own. This can, and usually does, sadden me.

Every once in a while, though, an image comes along that summons a very different response. The photograph may have been taken years prior and yet I feel not nostalgic and sad in viewing it, but alive and energized and hopeful. What is the dynamic behind this impression it leaves? I can’t say for certain, but my feeling is that the photographer didn’t simply capture a moment in time, but instead illuminated something of the “spirit” underneath that moment.

There is something intangible at the core of everything…….of every person or tree or rock or interaction between them……..and this is the mysterious, sometimes seemingly elusive thing that binds us all together. It is the thing that cannot be broken when all else crumbles and disintegrates into nothingness. We forget this in our daily “going about busy-ness”. And then we hear a particular piece of music, read a certain passage in a book, observe a lithe dancer’s body in motion, or view an evocative image…….and there it is, something without words adequate to define…….but we “feel” it.

I wish I could say that I’m able to create the type of images I am describing here with regularity, but that would be untrue. Most days I’m painfully aware that I’ve yet to even come close. But still I’m inspired by those who’ve given me a taste for what is possible, and therein lies the reason….the hope…… for my trying one more time in earnest to arrest this intangible quality and present it in a photograph.

 

~Cynthia