Mnemosyne

Photographs

I love looking at them, the whole composition, wondering what the photographer was thinking when he took that shot, why he decided on that particular position; figuring out the different stories the picture could tell and was telling.

Not that I’m any good at taking photos myself. God knows the number of times I got the photo department exasperated with my attempts at “artistic” shots, only to find vital portions of my subjects amputated; or people staring at my photographs scratching their heads in perplexity.

Anyway. It seems that I’ve been looking at a whole lot of photos the past few days. There was that exhibition along Orchard, the stretch outside Borders, called Earth from Above by a French photojournalist. The pictures capture the aerial views of various places around the world. Photographs are so powerful in the sense that they can completely transport the viewer into a different time and place, and for that moment one could just run away and be free. There was that issue of Time magazine with “The Best Photos of 2005”. In the opening paragraph of that feature, the writer said:

“What no one has entirely explained is how these weightless
images - the things we see – can affect us so deeply. All we know for sure is
that they defy the laws of physics. No matter how big you are, they can move
you.”

Those pictures told the stories of the past year, of the hurricanes that hit the United States, the aftermath of the Tsunami, the passing of Pope John Paul II, the London Bombings, among the many other significant events. Pictures show what no words can describe. The anguish. The joy. Or even the solemnity. All these, captured by a single flash, tell stories of people, of the world. The viewer moves with the photographer, with other viewers, into that particular instant, to feel those emotions. There was that exhibition at the Photographer’s Gallery at MICA, featuring a traveler’s depiction of Japan – old and modern, and the fusion of both extremes. There was that website and blog by a local photographer that has absolutely gorgeous portrait photographs.

Photographs somehow manage to capture that intense intertwining of realism and romanticism. On the one hand, there is that sense of reality that paintings fail to express in comparison; that sense of perfect mirroring of the world in that one photograph. On the other hand, that shot is only really seen by the photographer’s eye and the outcome is really the selective attention of the truth – selection being based on aesthetical, emotional, or spiritual value.

To quote a line out of Moulin Rouge, I sometimes feel photographs embody the bohemian spirit of "truth, beauty, freedom and that which I believe in above all things... LOVE."

The truth of the nature of what is captured.
The beauty in the aesthetics of that work of art.
The freedom to express the photographer’s emotions.
And the love for the subject in that it is worth capturing and sharing with the world.

Now if only I could take better pictures.